Helping recover bodies after a shipwreck off Puerto Rico's west coast, Luis Gonzalo isn't surprised to learn that the deceased are illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic. But he is startled to discover a murder victim among the drowned. When that corpse subsequently vanishes into the trunk of a mysterious police cruiser, Gonzalo, who serves as sheriff in the hill hamlet of Angustias, is understandably curious. He just doesn't anticipate the violence that will follow his inquiries, in Steven Torres's Precinct Puerto Rico: Book One.

"We are a small town with little excitement," one of Gonzalo's deputies says of Angustias. That, though, was before Nestor Ochoa, a corrupt San Juan police sergeant, had heard of the place. Tasked by his never-identified bosses in the alien-smuggling biz to stop Gonzalo's search for the missing dead man, Ochoa tries threatening the sheriff's family. When that doesn't work, he arranges a daylight robbery of Angustias' bank, apparently hoping to cover up one crime with another. But the assault goes disastrously awry, only increasing Gonzalo's determination to bring Ochoa down.

Torres is at his best when providing quirky dimensions to his small-town players--not all of them as likable as the change-resistant Gonzalo. He's less successful at exploiting the singular character and history of his Caribbean setting, and the cinematic fireworks in Precinct Puerto Rico sadly overwhelm what might have been a politically conscious police procedural, centered around the desperation of Dominicans to share in the American Dream. --J. Kingston Pierce