Hollowpoint — Rob Reuland

A hollowpoint, in ballistics terms, is a bullet that flattens on impact and chews its way through its victim. Assistant District Attorney Andrew Biobberti is its human equivalent. Gio works out of one of the more murderous precincts in Brooklyn, but even his most hardened colleagues have codes of behavior they don't like to see broken. There was a time when Gio pursued his job with vigor and a certain glee - sending hundreds of perps upstate and commanding the respect of the tough cops whose investigations he steered. Now he thinks mostly about his next drink and the next girl he can persuade to share it. A hand has reached into his chest and removed something that made the whole machine run. She was five years old, and her name was Opal. Over the course of one impossibly hot August, Gio's life comes apart. It's been a year since his daughter died, but the loss carves away at him still. A case too much like all the others crosses his desk: young girl found naked with a gunshot wound to the heart; crack head mother; guilty-looking boyfriend. Something in this ordinary, tawdry case uncovers a vast well of grief and rage in Gio, and it's unclear who will be the target of his urge to avenge a pointless death - or which death it is that he's avenging. His steely, ambitious young associate, Stacey (with whom he shares his bed but little more), watches with growing alarm as Gio lurches toward an act that could bring either destruction of redemption. He's badly in need of one of them.