LAPDANCE

"Beck is incredible" -- Gabriel Ben-Zion Abramovich

They call her unit LAPD-ANC. Her enemies call it LAPDANCE. For Officer Helen Barry, it's a punishment. But in the city's darkest corners, it might just be her salvation.

For fans of Michael Connelly and Faye Kellerman, LAPDANCE is a gritty, character-driven police procedural that introduces a brilliant and deeply flawed new heroine. Officer Helen Barry is a USC master's graduate and a self-described "badge bunny with a badge," whose affair with a married superior gets her exiled to the Area Nuisance & Crime Task Force-the department's doghouse. Her new beat isn't the high-stakes police work she craves, but the soul-crushing boredom of noise complaints, sad drunks, and the grim discovery of a wealthy young woman left to die like a "bundle of rags" in a filthy alley.

Helen's new partner is Sergeant Joe Gallo, a tenured professor of Criminal Justice who seems to relish the "boring" essence of policing. He's a "fallen rabbi" with his own catastrophic failures, and he challenges Helen's every instinct. As she is drawn into Gallo's intellectual orbit, a dangerous new man enters her life: Dr. Harris Gable, a Harvard-trained combat veteran who sees Helen's chaos not as a flaw, but as a high-risk asset to be acquired.

Harris doesn't offer Helen romance; he offers a merger. A chillingly logical life plan that is as seductive as it is terrifying.

Caught between a partner who wants to save her soul and a suitor who wants to own it, Helen must decide which cage is safer. In a city of transaction and illusion, she's about to learn that the most dangerous nuisance of all is a woman's own desire, and the price of containing it is everything.