The gray drizzle had turned to heavy rain, with huge, broken clouds dragging in off the Atlantic like ripped sails from some cosmic Trafalgar.

The second volume in Blake Banner’s likeable Dead Cold Mystery series is Two Bare Arms. It is autumn, and our heroes, John Stone and Carmen Dehan, New York cops who don’t play well with others but find they make a good team, have selected another old case from the files. This one concerns a pair of human arms (female) found twelve years ago in an East Bronx “lock up” and never connected to any case, body, or missing person. The suspects include a reclusive, somewhat creepy computer geek, a thuggish motorcycle gang member, and a Satanist. The case will not lack for false trails, lies, or danger.

I like a lot of things about this series. Stone and Dehan make an interesting team – lonely people silently reaching out to each other, though in denial about it. A man and a woman who have no friends, and so care all the more fiercely about the one friend they each possess – the other.

Also, whenever they have a chance to eat, they tend to eat steak, with relish. This raises them immensely in my estimation.

And the prose is sometimes superior.

I’m not so keen on the plotting. There are a fair amount of improbabilities, and genuine police procedure is a distant glimmer.

But it was fun. Cautions for language and adult themes.