Finding the barely alive body of Lissie Sexton in the ditch is what thrusts Jessie and Ebony back together, but it is the fact that there is a potential serial killer terrorizing the ladies of the night in Poughkeepsie that keeps them in each other's orbit. After hearing Lissie's story about how she was brutalized, beaten and nearly murdered by one of her regular johns, Ebony and her partner, Zander Pulaski, start digging into other similar cases, where the victims weren't lucky enough to survive. Ebony is driven by her own aunt's similar circumstances and disappearance many years ago, and she is convinced this man, "Doc," a hulking brute who wears scrubs, is preying on the women who have succumbed to a life of drugs and prostitution and are marginalized by the local PD.
Meanwhile, Jessie is preparing to go back to work after the birth of her baby, Lily, while negotiating a tricky custody matter with her ex, Kyle. Making life better is Lily, of course, but also her boyfriend, Hal Samuels, who is the current District Attorney. While she has several options in returning to her legal career, she is stunned when she is offered a high paying gig at the office of Jeremy Kaplan, a legal eagle who has recently fallen ill whom she interned with during high school, but also the man who called her integrity into question on the stand during Terrence Butterfield's trial, effectively destroying her career.
As if going to work for the man who derailed her career isn't difficult enough, when Lissie Sexton disappears, presumably being secretly hidden by Kaplan, Jessie finds herself under pressure from Ebony, who is desperate to speak to Lissie in the hopes that she can help them identify her attacker. Ebony has been working around the clock to find similar cases and she has discovered a number of cold cases in the surrounding cities, but her boss won't take the situation seriously without concrete evidence. Lissie Sexton's testimony is just what she needs, but now the abrasive girl has vanished.
Jessie's been out of the loop for a while taking care of Lily, but she will jump in head first with this case, which is wildly different from the corporate law that she previously practiced. She might even find herself coming face to face with a cold blooded killer.
Hooker Avenue was an interesting story, but I personally didn't connect with either Ebony Jones or Jessie Martin as characters. I enjoyed the ride I went on with the story, I just didn't love it enough to feel the need to go back and read the first book, The Midnight Call, although many events of that book are referenced in Hooker Avenue. I also didn't like the fact that the endings of many of the early chapters were specifically designed as hooks or cliffhangers, to get you to keep on reading, but they were either deliberately misleading or they were never addressed in text. In other words, some resolutions "appeared offscreen," and I found this annoying. There's also a point where the killer is mentioned by name and up to that point, the character's name had never been revealed. I can only hope this was due to an earlier, less fine-tuned and edited version that I received and was fixed before publication, because it definitely ruined the ending for me, since there was no guessing game. If you like crime thrillers, you might enjoy Hooker Avenue, especially if you are familiar with Poughkeepsie, NY. For me, it was just okay.
