Detective - Hardcover

Hailey, Arthur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517700255 ISBN 13: 9780517700259

Publisher: Crown, 1997

Synopsis

Hours before he is due to set off on a long-delayed and much-deserved vacation with his wife and son, Det.-Sgt. Malcolm Ainslie takes a phone call he would have been better off ignoring. The caller is the chaplain at Florida State Prison, delivering a message from Elroy Doil, the serial murderer Ainslie helped put on the prison's death row. On the eve of his execution, Doil has asked to make a confession. But there is a condition: he will deliver it only in person to Ainslie.

Ainslie has no choice. Doil was convicted of a double murder, but he was suspected in ten more. No homicide detective could turn down the opportunity to close ten murder cases in a single night. What Ainslie learns from the condemned man, however, propels the ex-priest-turned-cop into an investigation that reaches into the most elite levels of his own department and the Miami city government. And it tests as never before his skills as a cop and his character as a man.

Master storyteller Arthur Hailey is legendary for the scrupulously researched authenticity and electrifying realism of his novels, for taking readers inside the places where men and women endure and sometimes crack under the pressures of jobs that shape our lives and world. Bristling with the sights, sounds, and true-to-life details of a contemporary urban homicide division, and with all the narrative suspense that has made him one of the best-selling fiction writers of our time, Detective is the novel Arthur Hailey was destined to write.

About this title

About the Author:

The author of many best sellers, including Airport, Hotel, The Evening News, Wheels, and The Moneychangers, Arthur Hailey is one of the world's most recognized and successful writers. He lives in the Bahamas.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Hailey (The Evening News, 1990, etc.) makes a welcome return to form with an effectively twisty thriller. On the eve of his execution, serial killer Elroy Doil calls in Malcolm Ainslie, the priest turned Miami detective who put him on death row. In a last confession, the doomed man (suspected of fourteen ritual homicides but convicted of only four) confides that, while he committed most of the murders, there are two victims on Ainslie's list that he did not kill. Although happy to clear the books of many gruesome slayings, the cleric (a scholar whose knowledge of the Book of Revelations led him to Doil) is disturbed enough to reopen the case. The odd casualties out are the politically powerful parents of Cynthia Ernst, until recently an aggressive, ambitious policewoman with whom Malcolm (despite being happily married and the father of a small child) had a torrid affair. Patiently sifting through mounds of evidence old and new, he's eventually able to prove the headline-grabbing butchery of the couple was indeed a copycat murder. He also has enough on his erstwhile paramour to get her indicted. This outcome could prove politically as well as personally embarrassing, since vengeful Cynthia has taken her late father's seat on the city's board of supervisors and used her clout to block Malcolm's promotion from sergeant to lieutenant. How Hailey resolves these conflicts while ensuring that the guilty pay makes for a suspenseful windup as effective as it is cynical. There's also a credible turn at the close as the less than saintly Malcolm weighs a career switch. A police procedural plus, powerfully infused with southern Florida's violent neo-Cuban ambience, and a work that could earn the veteran author a host of new fans. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0517700255
• ISBN 13: 9780517700259
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400