Escape is the third in the Billy Harney series of thrillers by James Patterson and David Ellis. Harney leads an elite team of Chicago police. The book opens with Harney and his partner, Clara, hot on the trail of a pedophile kidnapper. They chase the man into a house, but find out too late that it’s been booby trapped. The place explodes while the perp escapes, killing Clara in the process.
Grieving his partner, Harney vows to get the guy who did it. Luckily, the girl he kidnapped survived the ordeal. She’ll help identify her abductor eventually. In the meantime, though, he seems to have taken another woman hostage, hiding her in an underground lair.
In the meantime, Harney is tasked with neutralizing the biggest drug gang in the city. Led by a dignified hoodlum named Jericho, this gang seems completely out of reach by law enforcement. Jericho makes good on his threat to kill anyone who rats him out, so the cops get nowhere with him, until they find a weak spot, a kid genius who helps him launder his money. Harney and his team are going to do an Al Capone bust on Jericho and take him down. Both are arrested and put into a privately owned jail that serves the city.
And in the further meantime, a 14-year-old girl walks into the police station, asks for Harney by name and tells him that she believes her billionaire father, Henry Arcola, is about to murder her mother. Harney at first thinks this is some sort of joke or the act of a disturbed teenager. But, she plays him a surreptitious recording of a phone conversation that features her father seeming to order a hit on his wife. Harney promises to look into it, and interviews Arcola. He gets nowhere, but leaves with the distinct impression that his daughter is correct. And, she is. The woman is found dead soon enough.
And in the further, further, meantime, Harney gets very drunk at a cop bar and performs a standup comedy act. This seems to be a recurring thing for him, and everyone sort of loves it. Harney is a lost soul whose wife and daughter died a couple of years ago. He never got over it, and now with his partner dead, he’s an even loster soul. He meets cute with the bartender, a young woman in law school. She cuts him off for being too drunk but somehow falls for him at the same time. He’s that kind of guy.
Meanwhile, Harney arrests Arcola, who, despite being loaded, fails to hire a lawyer. He’s sitting in jail without a plan, or so it seems. That strikes Harney as odd, but it doesn’t mean much on its own. Arcola has scrubbed his existence clean, so there’s almost nothing they can pin on him. The murder case is thin.
The case against Jericho and his money launderer is also thin. All the evidence is digitally impenetrable and they are worried they won’t get a chance to crack it before Jericho kills his money laundering pal.
And, even though it occurs toward the end of the book, this is not a spoiler: Arcola escapes from jail. (It’s on the dust jacket, so forgive me.) The final segment of the book is an edge of your seat chase and race against time to save the kidnapped girl and catch Arcola before he flees the country. There are a few big surprises, too, which I won’t reveal except to say that they rely on some pretty heavy coincidences.
This is a highly entertaining book, even if the plot is a bit too convenient at times. Ellis, who works as a judge by day, knows the ins and outs of the legal system well, and he presents them in a very easy to understand form. He’s got a great sense of pace and suspense. It’s a masterful cop thriller, without a moment of down time. You’ll be turning pages all the way through. He writes in the present tense, with Harney’s sections in the first person. You’re seeing things from his frantic point of view. It’s a fun read.