Debts of the City: A Marcus Romano Investigation

At 2:11 a.m., the sound reaches Detective Marcus Romano as pressure before it becomes meaning.

Award-winning author Christopher Reynolds returns to the Marcus Romano Investigations with a case of buried histories, institutional pressure, and debts San Francisco never truly settled.

By the time Romano is running toward the glow, San Francisco has already started deciding what it wants this to be.

A device has torn open the entrance of a gallery in the Mission District. It is not the first. A month earlier, another device detonated without injuring anyone. It was clean, controlled, and built by the same hand, which means the first explosion was not an attack. It was a rehearsal.

The man building them is not a fanatic. He is an archivist working from a fogged-in room off Twenty-Fifth Avenue, surrounded by gallery programs, donor acknowledgments, and annual reports printed in runs too small for any library to preserve. He compares the names that were once there with the names quietly edited out and the names added without explanation. He has narrowed the list to seven and written them in pencil because the list may still change.

He is not acting at random. He is settling accounts.

Romano and his partner, Lena Cho, follow the paper instead of the panic. A gallery refuses to discuss its ownership history. A Pacific Heights attorney walks from his door to his car without ever checking the street. Corporate filings disagree about who owned what and when. What they uncover is not a conspiracy, but an arrangement that is old, orderly, and still operating.

Then the Mayor's office calls the chief at 5:40. The chief calls Captain Price at 6:05. The department needs visible action within forty-eight hours, and there is a suspect available who would satisfy everyone except Romano.

Because the debt beneath this case was never paid.

It was filed.

Debts of the City, recognized for Outstanding Literary Achievement in Crime Fiction by the International Impact Book Awards, is the second Marcus Romano Investigation, a slow-burn police procedural about institutional pressure, buried histories, and a detective who refuses to let momentum finish the investigation for him.

Where Closure Rate tested restraint, Debts of the City tests urgency.

Some debts the city never lets you forget.

Debts of the City

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