The Odds by Kathleen George

This was a good book. There are a couple of overlapping stories. I guess this is part of a series of detective stories featuring homicide chief Richard Christie and his team of detectives but they were merely a sideline to the main characters. The storyline that was of most interest to me was that of 4 siblings who have just been abandoned by their losery step-mom. Determined not to end up in foster care, the kids decide to tell no one and to fend for themselves. In the process they meet the man who runs the pizza shop across the road who gives them a free pizza when they can't afford to pay for it. Later, one of the kids finds the pizza guy near death lying in an abandoned building with another man dead beside him. The kids adopt him as a project and nurse him back to health. All this runs concurrently with a story of a drug dealing ring, lots of hodlums and the police seeking to figure out just what is going on. It was an interesting story, very well written and an easy read.