Bag Men

A priest lies dead on the tarmac of Logan Airport.  Hours later, first assistant DA Ray Dunn is standing in the well-appointed living room of his boss, sipping a Bushmills under photographs of the Cardinal, the governor, and Ted Williams, getting the shaft from a man he has been protecting for years.  

Ray Dunn is a keeper of secrets.  It's an art he learned in the Irish neighborhoods of Boston in the fifties, when all men were cops or priests, and when Dunn's father took the fall in a police corruption scandal.  Now it's 1965: there are beatniks in Harvard Square, a little war in Vietnam, and Latin is still in the Church.  And everything Ray Dunn has ever believed, everything he ever tried to be, is collapsing all around him.

Cut loose by his DA boss, Dunn is watching his career veer into crisis, while the best cop he knows is going off on a rogue operation, searching for the source of a new drug that's killing junkies on the streets.  And as the priest's murder case and the drug war come together, they do so with a crash, as Dunn is plunged into a hunt for a madman whose killing spree has only just begun.

John Flood is a pseudonym for a native of Boston who works as a federal prosecutor.