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"Superb investigative tale"

Though she raises a toddler and deals with her teenage son arrested for shoplifting, Emma Price knows that her time in Brooklyn as a single mother feels like heaven compared to her current assignment as a New York City Capital Defender's Office investigator. Emma is to uncover anything that will enable Roland Everett to avoid the obvious death penalty. When his injury compensation claim was rejected Roland retaliated by killing three people.

While Emma struggles with finding anything to help her "client", her lover, Brooklyn Homicide Detective Laurence Solomon, works on the execution of abortion- rights activist Dr. Eleanor Hammond. Emma knew Eleanor and the woman's family when she was a child, but found nothing redeeming in any of her relationships with any of the Hammond brood so she wonders why she thinks a friend was killed. Though an anti-abortion group claims the credit, Emma believes that this homicide is more domestic in nature and begins her own inquiries.

In some ways STEALING FOR A LIVING is a simplistic look at evil, yet paradoxically that is why the second Emma Price novel (see THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY) is a superb investigative tale as Naomi Rand focuses on the rationalization for murder justifiable in the killers' minds. Fans of urban mysteries will appreciate this novel as Emma struggles on all fronts, whether it is at home in Brooklyn, in her competition with her lover on the Hammond homicide, or failing to find a redeeming quality for a malevolent bigot who she believes deserves death.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted May 10, 2003

The author of the acclaimed The One That Got Away, Naomi Rand returns with her second novel in the cutting-edge mystery series featuring the clever and fearless Emma Price.

An investigator with the Capital Defender's Office, Emma Price is assigned to the case of an accused murderer who faces death row unless she can dig up mitigating circumstances. Meanwhile, she's juggling her role as the newly single mother of a toddler and a troubled teenager who's heading down a slippery slope that's all too familiar to her.

Just when it seems things can't get any worse, Emma learns that an old family friend, a controversial political activist, has been murdered. Determined to do whatever she can to find the killer, she steps in to help her prickly lover, Laurence Solomon, a New York City detective, in his efforts to solve the crime. Before long she uncovers dark family secrets that force her to confront her own past before she can get at the truth.

In Stealing for a Living, Naomi Rand masterfully combines a brilliant whodunit with compelling, well-drawn characters. This fast-paced, gripping story is sure to keep readers enthralled to the very end.