Billy Graves, NYPD, is a cop with a history, a member of a group of mostly-now-ex-detectives each of whom has a personal White Whale, a One That Got Away. When their Whites start turning up dead, Billy is forced to confront the possibility that one or more of his friends might be involved. Meanwhile, his family is the target of a series of unsettling and increasingly violent incidents at the hands (unbeknownst to him) of one of his colleagues.
If you like your cops morally-compromised-but-basically-decent…well, then, basically the whole of the crime thriller genre is your oyster, but here you have another example of more of the same. This novel basically amounts to one slightly crooked cop examining his conscience in relation to his slightly more crooked buddies, while an even more crooked cop provides us with an example of how high the stakes can get in the game of crooked cop roulette, and his ex-cop father drops hints about his somewhat crooked past. It’s crooked all the way down.
There’s nothing wrong with this book; it’s a good read. No doubt other reviews which I have not read are using words like “gritty” and “urban” to describe it, and they’re basically right. Evidently the author worked as a writer on The Wire for part of its run, and I have no problem believing that. I can’t see that it did anything particularly new as a novel, but it didn’t do anything wrong either. It’s a moderately entertaining book about interesting characters interacting in ways that are mostly predictable, but still produce results that make for a decent afternoon’s relaxation. Don’t peg your expectations too high and you’ll come through just fine. Evidently this book is being developed into a film to be released in 2017, because exactly what the world needs is another movie about a troubled white guy.