Readers who’ve followed my remarks in these pages about why I like some mystery writers and not others know that a strong sense of place is one of the main things I look for.

If you’ve ever been the least bit curious about—ready?—St. Louis, have I got a book for you: With a Vengeance, by Eileen Dreyer.

For me St. Louis has mainly been the place with an ancient world’s fair where an impossibly young and wholesome Judy Garland sang about a clanging trolley. Later there was something about a soaring arch beside the Mississippi River. Otherwise, zilch.

Plunge into Eileen Dreyer’s humdinger of a story, though, and suddenly you’re in a half-forgotten great American city that you want to go see, and feel, listen to, and explore. A city old enough to have layers and neighborhoods and architecture all working together in the sometimes harmonious, sometimes disharmonious whole makes the best cities so seductive.

Dreyer not only gives you St. Louis, she also gives you a strange, gripping insider’s tale from somewhere way out on the fringes of genre-writing.

Maggie O’Brien, her protagonist, is a cop’s daughter who’s struggled hard in the shadow of her bigger-than-life father to create a life for herself. Unwilling to become the cop he wanted her to be, she makes her first career as an emergency room nurse. Not satisfied with that challenge she trains hard and qualifies as number one medic on the St. Louis SWAT team.

Dreyer having done all that herself in real life fills whole pages with convincing, riveting insider-details far beyond the superficial color that passes for reality on code-filled TV shows.

All that—good as it is—is only background for the gripping plot that she then sets in motion.

O’Brien, in her ER and SWAT team work, begins to suspect that "unnecessary" deaths have been occurring in her hospital. Against her will she is drawn into trying to find out what’s going on. Only her commitment to patient care keeps her going as various obstacles are put in her way, not the least of these being that she herself becomes the prime suspect. It’s clear that some people in St. Louis don’t want her looking in certain dark corners of the city, and of course one of those people is her own hero-cop father.

Tossing off red herrings with the practiced ease of a master thriller writer, Dreyer takes us all over the city, giving us both St. Louis and a good sampling of its populace in a way that makes you want to hop on the next plane.

Short of that, just get the book. And, I guarantee, next time you’re within day-trip distance of St. Louis, you’ll go. Think New Orleans without the tourist sleaze but also deeply and mysteriously rocked in the cradle of the great river itself.