A smart, and very relevant, mystery by a prolific writer of stage and screen, Michael Elias’s You Can Go Home Now will take you on an intense rollercoaster ride alongside Detective Nina Karim, a homicide investigator in Queens, New York.
Nina is a hard-edged detective, who has most certainly been dealt a bad hand in life, causing the reader to repeatedly think about how many things in life are truly black and white, and just how many are really in shades of grey. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, and sometimes those are both hard to remember.
With recurring themes of revenge, justice, power, and victimhood, there are frank and graphic discussions of domestic violence situations that might be too much for sensitive readers. They certainly do pack a punch if you will pardon the metaphor.
Nina is currently investigating a series of cold case murders of men who were known to be violent and abusive with their wives or girlfriends. The men had all been served with restraining orders and in each of the cases there was documentation of the abuse. What these cases also have in common, however, is each one of the wives or girlfriends have the very same alibi. While no one wants to talk at first, they each ultimately admit that they were in a battered women’s shelter called Artemis at the time of the murders. Even the detectives who regularly work on domestic violence cases have never heard of Artemis.
Nina is eventually able to infiltrate Artemis and discovers that its inner workings, at least to some degree, line up with her own inner demons. Part of the “bad hand” Nina was dealt included the violent murder of her father in their family kitchen. As a doctor who performed abortions, he had been singled out by a radical group and was assassinated by a pro-life fanatic. Nina’s entire life has had one singular purpose, and that is to find the killer (who was never caught) and exact her own style of justice on him.
It becomes difficult to rationalise the Nina Karim we have seen skilfully going about her duties as an investigator with the person we now realise only became an officer in the first place so that she could find and destroy another human being. It is a less than noble reason to join a very noble profession.
The incredibly sharp dialogue and such murky ethical questions will keep readers turning page after page. It is not a story full of likeable characters, but it is a story full of very real characters. The themes will work themselves into your brain and not let you go, not to mention the incredible climax that you simply will not see coming!
You Can Go Home Now is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of June 23rd 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In this smart, relevant, unputdownable psychological thriller, a woman cop is on the hunt for a killer while battling violent secrets of her own.
“My name is Nina Karim. I am a single thirty-one-year-old woman who likes cats, Ryan Reynolds movies, beautiful sunsets, walking on a wintry beach holding hands with a tall, caring, lightly bearded third wave feminist. Yeah, right.”
Nina is a tough Queens detective with a series of cold case homicides on her desk – men whose widows had the same alibi: they were living in Artemis, a battered women’s shelter, when their husbands were killed.
Nina goes undercover into Artemis. Though she is playing the victim, she is anything but. Nina knows about violence and the bullies who rely on it because she has experienced it in her own life.
In this heart-pounding thriller Nina confronts the violence of her own past in Artemis where she finds solidarity with a community of women who deal with abusive and lethal men in their own way.
For the women living in Artemis there is no absolute moral compass, there is the law and there is survival. And, for Nina, who became a cop so she could find the man who murdered her father, there is only revenge.
