escroart, the author of the New York Times best-selling series starring Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky, introduces a new series character here. Wyatt Hunt is an embittered ex-caseworker in San Francisco, dismissed from Child Protective Services in a dispute with his boss. He is now at the first stages of recovering from this blow, which threatens not his love of salary or sense of self but his mission to save the most vulnerable castoffs in the city. It's pretty standard in mysteries, and even cliched, to have somebody wrongly fired (usually from the police) sink into seclusion or the bottle and then move into private-eye work as a way back to life. This premise gives the character a depth of expertise to draw on and, theoretically, a sufficiently cynical outlook on life.