The Informer #1

With those delicate hands and artistic fingers, Hector Oomlaut could've been a painter or concert pianist—but instead, he became Hector the Spectre, the greatest pickpocket in the underworld. After years of perfecting his craft across elevators, cafeterias, and crowded streets, Hector assembles a crew to tackle the most demanding job of all: stealing from the inside breast pocket of a jacket. As his criminal empire reaches new heights and romance blooms, Hector finally allows himself to dream of a life beyond the grift—but his past has other plans.

Kenny Cogan has come home to his tough old neighborhood as a newly minted cop, but his younger brother Willie resents the uniform and the badge—especially when Spider, a local operator with an eye for easy scores, sees the perfect angle to draw the boy into a cigarette warehouse heist that demands a cop's gun. As Kenny works his beat trying to hold the neighborhood together, Willie's pride and anger are about to collide with his brother's duty in a way neither of them will forget.

Detective Fabian catches a Missing Persons case when a distraught husband reports his wife Evelyn vanished—but when a blonde body turns up in the river, the coroner's swift verdict of suicide seems to close the book. Yet something nags at Fabian's instincts, and a closer look at the evidence sends him back to Steven Winstable's lonely old house, where a detail about those waterlogged lungs could change everything. A tight little mystery that proves sometimes the most obvious answer is exactly the wrong one.