Everyone has an angle. This old adage is certainly proven to be true in The Window Washer, Eric Rill’s newest tale of murder, greed, and corruption on a grand scale. At the heart of the story is Rill’s main protagonist, Nick Grant, an ‘Everyman’ kind of guy who, the reader quickly discovers in the opening chapter, is in shock as he watches his wife’s charred remains being removed from what’s left of their family home. Even more horrific is the fact that his beloved son has barely managed to survive the blaze and is clinging to life before he eventually succumbs to his injuries and tragically dies.

Until this point, Nick had been running the Crown, one of a chain of hotels owned by his father, a man that Nick despises. The death of his beloved little family sends Nick over the edge. He all but severs his tenuous relationship with his father, leaves his job, and begins a downward spiral of alcohol and drugs which eventually ends when he finally goes for counselling and he’s given a job washing windows at the Langham, an older apartment complex. There, it quickly becomes apparent to Nick that strange activities are taking place in the apartment complex; activities which seem to revolve around Angela Ferraro, an attractive young woman, and a bruiser named Tony Castellano. It isn’t until Nick witnesses a violent physical altercation between Ferraro and Castellano, with Castellano’s body soon found at the bottom of the ravine, that Nick realizes there may be more to the two’s relationship than just a series of illicit trysts.

The Window Washer has an interesting host of characters, from corrupt politicians, crusty FBI agents, a powerful crime family and, finally, to cops with their own agendas. While this in itself may seem like standard fare for a compelling read, what makes the mix especially interesting is that the book is set in Columbus, Ohio – not exactly a well-known hotbed for Mafioso activity like New York or Chicago. While Rill’s primary characters are fully-formed and three-dimensional, there does seem to be a few too many characters who don’t necessarily serve to move the story along. However, this does not take away from the momentum of the story as a whole. Layer by layer, character by character, the tale unfolds until the reader is irrevocably immersed, unable to put the book down until the last page has been read.

The Window Washer by Eric Rill is a crime novel based in Columbus, Ohio where a man named Grant who doesn't want to deal in a life of crime anymore gets dragged back into it. His wife, an old acquaintance of his father, and his son are killed in a house fire that was definitely not an accident, and he has to witness the death of his son over the course of over a week while he is in constant pain. This leads him down a dark path, and throughout the novel he is constantly getting sucked further and further into that old life.

The most striking part of this novel is that the setting is really brought to life by the author. There are a lot of details that only people who know the city very well would recognize, but even readers who have never been to Columbus would be able visualize it in their minds. There is a large cast of characters and a deep crime vibe to the novel as things build up to their eventual climax. Eventually we start to see how deep this entire corrupt group runs and it's difficult to tell the good guys from the bad. Eric Rill deftly brings us into the world and this character as we see the son, Billy, die. It's harrowingly described and instantly makes us start rooting for Grant, a Byronic hero, to win out in the end. Eric Rill has a real winner with The Window Washer!