In the third book in the Jimmy Flannery series, a light-hearted series that features a Chicago precinct worker as the unlikeliest of detectives. It is a city where the old world of favor-for-favor is fading out and the old guard is retiring. Flannery is a redheaded Irishman who simply wants to do favors for his community and doesn’t really have an interest in power politics. But, he has a knack for getting involved with dead bodies and situations and cover-ups and he, like any junkyard dog, doesn’t let go once he gets his teeth into something.

In this book, he encounters every sewer worker’s nightmare, a body severed in half by a giant crocodile, but when he tries to find out what happened because, in the natural course of things, there should not be any crocodiles in Chicago’s sewers, he finds people trying to shut down his investigation.

What’s great about this series is the different neighborhoods that Flannery encounters and the down-home way of talking and narrating Flannery has that always make you feel as if you are sitting in a tavern having a beer with him, listening to him spout off wild yarns. ( )