Hard-nosed, relentless, a force to be reckoned with - these words aptly describe both the ex-cop detective hero of Where the Dead Lay, Frank Behr, and the edgy noir style of author David Levien. The first novel in the Frank Behr series, City of the Sun, met critical acclaim, and this latest book shouldn’t do anything but add to the accolades Levien richly deserves for his terse dialogue and suspenseful storylines. Where the Dead Lay proves that David Levien belongs in the ranks of some of today’s best mystery authors, like Lee Child, James Patterson, and Robert Crais, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who likes the mystery/thriller genre.

In this outing, Behr relentlessly tracks down clues and witnesses to try to learn who murdered his jiu-jitsu instructor, Aurelio Santos, and also locate two detectives gone missing from an exclusive private investigation firm. He gets involved with the Indianapolis criminal underworld and has to figure out what gambling rings that operate out of “pea-shake” houses have to do with the detectives’ disappearance. He eventually finds that what he’d thought were two completely separate cases are inexorably intertwined into one. If he can discover who murdered his friend and mentor Santos, he will also discover what happened to the two detectives. But, he has to ask himself, is his single-minded pursuit of Santos’s killers worth the possibility of losing a chance at having a happy relationship with his pregnant girlfriend?

Indianapolis isn’t exactly the first major city one thinks of when coming up with a list of cities with high crime rates, but it has a seamy underbelly that just might make it as notorious for its literary crime figures if not its actual ones, as Laura Lippman has done for Baltimore. Before reading Where the Dead Lay, I confess I had never heard of a pea-shake house. Even if I’d known what it was, I’d probably never have considered Indianapolis to be the gambling hotbed that Levien’s novel depicts it to be. It’s also not the first place that I think of when I think of martial arts, but it’s a city that has more than its share of superb martial arts schools and instructors.

The book opens with Frank headed to an early morning private lesson with Aurelios. He likes the personal, one-on-one aspect of these lessons, and Frank’s such a big, strong guy that he has inadvertently injured the people he’s sparred with in the past. Training with one of the top Brazilian jiu-jitsu teachers helps to insure that such accidents will be kept to a minimum. When he arrives at the Academy, he sees a pair of patrol cars and an ambulance with its flashers on: Aurelio has been killed by a shotgun blast under his palate that’s blown most of his head off. There are indications that he fought with whoever did it to him:

It came together in an instinctive rush in his mind: Aurelio had been shotgunned under the palate. It had been an interrogation finished by an execution, but not before a struggle. No two men he’d ever met could’ve held Aurelio down. A gun changed the equation, to be sure, but Behr’s gut reaction was that there had to be three, at least. The body had been dragged a distance, but then abandoned.

He doesn’t want to slow or hinder his search for Santos’s killers for any reason, so when he’s approached to look into the whereabouts of the two missing detectives, at first he turns the offer down. He eventually – reluctantly - takes the case, though, and learns that somebody - or group of somebodies - are beating up, intimidating, and brutally murdering the people who run pea-shake houses. Pea-shake houses are a type of lottery or numbers racket, and though the numbers that its players bet on were originally written on dried-up peas, now little plastic balls are used. People are seduced by it in droves, flocking to the houses for the small chance that they might be one of the lucky ones to hit it big. Some lose their entire paychecks to this addiction, much like people do at casinos or with state lotteries.

There’s an entire family behind the city-wide intimidation of pea-shop operators, and their plan is to force the shops to close down, take them over for themselves, make them profitable again and sell out to some big crime syndicate. The tense, action-filled encounters Behr has with the father and sons of this family, who all know jiu-jitsu and use weapons like baseball bats as well, are some of the highlights of the novel, as is the dichotomy that the author sets up between Behr and Terry Schlegel, the patriarch of the crime family. Behr has a difficult time forming and keeping personal relationships, while Schlegel - vicious, cold-blooded murderer though he may be - has a close and seemingly loving relationship with his family. In this respect, one can almost identify with the killers more than with Behr, and it makes the Schlegels more three-dimensional and realistic.

Where the Dead Lay makes for a great, edge-of-your-seat read that easily stands on its own as a good, brooding, crime novel. If you haven’t read City of the Sun, I also highly recommend that, but reading it isn’t at all necessary to thoroughly enjoy reading the second Frank Behr novel. I look forward to reading more from David Levien in the future, and to seeing what the next case that Frank Behr obsesses over to keep me up late into the night again, myself obsessed with one of the best new mystery writers of today.