Returning after fourteen years to the streets he once policed, Ray Sharkey reflects on the circumstances that conspired in his downfall and the murders that eventually sent him down. "Bad cops don't start out running a string of whores or taking out contracts on somebody's life," he says at one point. "They all start out with a nickel heist." Desperate to cover his daughter's medical bills, he starts on the take, and by the time his cancer-ridden wife is taken upstate, he is up to his neck in dirty money and underworld contacts.

When Mayor Richard Daley dies, the political weight of the city is up for grabs and the team surrounding The Candidate have hopes on hanging the rogue Irish cop in a blaze of publicity, some motivated by more personal grudges than mere political expediency. He half lives with the black prostitute Roma Chounard, but harbours dangerous, unspoken designs on his sister Wilda, and assigned to investigate the savage beating to death of a man in a hotel room, the noose begins to tighten about his neck.

Like much of Campbell's work, Boneyards takes its setting in Chicago, rooting events in the machinations of the city's political life as much as its crime-ridden streets, much like his ever-expanding series of novels featuring Democratic fixer Jimmy Flannery. But unlike their lighter tone, this is a dark, cruel novel. To claim Sharkey as a hero is say a lot about those that surround him. Hopelessly corrupt, violent and largely racist, Campbell is careful to paint his central character's complicated, disastrous personal life as an understandable motivation for his actions without ever trying for justification. Indeed, towards the end private tragedy looms large but any sympathy is tempered when Sharkey is given over to a casual act of spite directed towards his sister and her black friends that escalates his feuding with underworld mover and shaker Tourette to dangerous heights.

Unlike the Florida-set Juice, or the superb La-La Land trilogy, the central difficulty with Boneyards is a lack of contrast to focus the sadistic majority of the plot. Where those books opt to line-up their atrocities against a certain levity to add colour, the scenes here with his wife and daughter designed to go some way to restoring the balance ultimately feel lightweight, added for completeness rather than real need. Indeed, the women of the novel - Sharkey's immediate family aside - are its real strength, islands of sanity in this world of exclusively male honour codes. Their all too-brief appearances counterpoint the ruthlessness of their men-folk to some effect and leave the reader wishing Campbell had felt the need to bolster their parts against the insanity. That said, Campbell's years in the novel and (Oscar nominated) screenplay business have made his touch assured, his handling of the harshness of a Chicago winter carries a cold sting of authenticity, and his dialogue has rhythm and sparkle. A good, solid rather than remarkable piece of American crime fiction.