The Last Precinct

By Ben Oloche

About This Book
A retired Chicago police sergeant is found shot dead in his study in Mount Greenwood. Single shot, professional placement, professional entry through a picked lock. On his desk: an open cold case file from 2013. A twenty-two-year-old named DeShawn Holloway, shot in an alley in Englewood. Ruled accidental discharge. Case closed in eleven days.
The two investigating officers were Patrick Dolan, now dead and Raymond Cheung, now Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. The patrol officer first on scene was Frank Caruso, now the leading candidate in the Cook County Sheriff's race.
Detective Maya Cross has worked for this department for eight years. She is about to investigate it.
Waiting outside Area Three the morning after the murder is Josephine Adeyemi, community organizer, Englewood resident, and the woman who has been trying to reopen the Holloway case through official channels for four years. Three formal submissions. Two aldermen. A state senator. Each time the case was properly investigated and closed. She has a photograph taken forty minutes before DeShawn Holloway died that shows him in the alley without any weapon.
The forensic lab's independent records separated from the department's case management system by a quality control audit have survived intact. The fingerprint analysis from the weapon recovered at the scene was run the day of the shooting and never entered into the case file. The prints belong to Frank Caruso. The weapon is his service weapon.
The cover-up reaches from the investigating officers to the district commander who was told what happened the morning after the shooting and decided not to stand in the way. It has been running for eleven years, through promotions and retirements and four years of formal requests from a community organizer who kept being told to stop. It ended when Patrick Dolan stopped sleeping and started making calls and someone decided to make sure he stopped.
Maya Cross works the case with the city's Inspector General, outside the normal reporting structure of a department whose second-highest officer is a material witness. She follows the evidence through the lab records and the phone records and a retired district commander who has been waiting for this conversation for eleven years. She builds the case that needs to be built.
And then she drives to Englewood on a Saturday in June, just as a person, and sits near the alley where DeShawn Holloway died, and thinks about what the work costs and why it is worth paying.

The third Maya Cross novel is the most personal and the most institutional book about a detective investigating her own department, about the specific cost of doing the work correctly when the work requires turning the tools of your profession toward the profession itself. Grounded in the specific geography and history of Chicago's South Side, The Last Precinct is a book about what eleven years of carried guilt does to a man's sleep, what four years of refused submissions does to a community organizer's persistence, and what a twenty-two-year-old in an alley deserves from the institution that failed him.
Powerful, precise, and morally serious, The Last Precinct confirms Maya Cross as one of the most important new voices in American crime fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYFC9FLS
• ISBN13: 9798258648808
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 108 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"