Eriq La Salle's Laws of Wrath took me by surprise. For some reason,I was looking for something along the lines of Sci-Fi and found a well-plotted Thriller instead. If you like a lot of details and background information to help you understand the characters, then Eriq La Salle does a great job with that. He creates a nice balance between each character's background and their present-day personalities,without making the reader feel as though they're receiving a historical lecture.

When the story begins, Eriq shocks us with one of the characters, Dr. Zibik, who I thought would have a short and insignificant role at first. He paints this timid and shy picture of her until she is escorted inside the all women's maximum security prison; here, Dr. Zibik's character transforms into this lethal killer and invokes fear in the other inmates, as soon as the handcuffs come off. Her mission to exercise control inside a prison complex is accomplished. No one wants to tango with the Devil.

The meat of the story begins to unfold a couple of chapters in, starting with the broken relationship between A.J., the trans-sexual, and his brother Phee, a New York officer. It's not before long when tragedy strikes Clay's home and his youngest son, Phee, must deliver the news of A.J.'s death. What Eriq does with this situation, is take us back in time to Clay's violent past. At the news of Clay's eldest son's death, he begins to wonder if karma came to pay him a visit for the lives he took many years earlier. In spite the strained relationship he had with A.J., Eriq is careful not to bury Clay's love for his son. He does the same with Phee. He plays on Phee's guilt for failing to help A.J. when he was alive, by tormenting him with A.J.'s gutted corpse and lidless eyes staring at him in the morgue. It almost seems as though this tragedy is Phee's motive to reconcile on a spiritual level with his dead brother; with the help of his partner Quincy, Phee races against the clock to put this and a string of other mysterious murders to bed. This is when Zibik's character really comes to life as the mastermind, the manipulator, the True Throne. When the Feds use Zibik to get to the perpetrators responsible for the mysterious murders, it all plays in Zibik's favor... for a while.

No one goes unnoticed in this book. Every character has a story and yet, all eyes are still on Phee and the investigation. Things are shaken up when the investigation gets turned upside down, Phee goes AWOL and is torn between being a cop and a civilian; Quincy is still trying to play it by the books while Phee is out for blood.

Eriq La Salle has made Laws of Wrath well worth the read. If you're looking for an intense, drama-filled plot, this book is packed with it. You will be on your toes all the way to the end.

Worth five stars. ( )