4. Unpunished by Lisa Black

#2 Renner & Gardiner

listened on Audible

2017
320 pgs.
Adult Police Procedural
Finished 1/9/23
Goodreads rating: 3.60
My rating: 2.5
Setting: Contemporary 

My comments:  If you're interested in the newspaper publishing business and how it's dying and want to be lectured ad nauseam about it, this is the book for you.  It wasn't particularly the book for me.  The other half of the book, the actual mystery, was okay.... 

Goodreads synopsis:  Maggie Gardiner, a forensic expert who studies the dead, and Jack Renner, a homicide cop who stalks the living, form an uneasy partnership to solve a series of murders in this powerful new thriller by the bestselling author of That Darkness.

It begins with the kind of bizarre death that makes headlines--literally. A copy editor at the Cleveland Herald is found hanging above the grinding wheels of the newspaper assembly line, a wide strap wrapped around his throat. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner has her suspicions about this apparent suicide inside the tsunami of tensions that is the news industry today--and when the evidence suggests murder, Maggie has no choice but to place her trust in the one person she doesn't trust at all . . .

Jack Renner is a killer with a conscience, a vigilante with his own code of honor. In the past, Jack has used his skills and connections as a homicide detective to take the law into his own hands, all in the name of justice. He has only one problem: Maggie knows his secret. She insists he enforce the law, not subvert it. But when more newspaper employees are slain, Jack may be the only person who can help Maggie unmask the killer-- even if Jack is still checking names off his own private murder list.