The First Directive

A rich man's teenage daughter has disappeared, and for some reason, people in high places are getting nervous. Sergeant Fraleigh, a homicide cop, is put on the case and promptly violates the first directive of police work: he gets involved with a beautiful suspect.

Publisher’s description: “Out in Silicon Valley the microchips grow as quietly as the piles of money being made by the high-tech new rich. And Adolph Stone is as rich as any of them. He’s also a slumlord and a friend of the lieutenant governor. So when his beautiful 16-year-old daughter is missing, Sergeant Fraleigh of the homicide squad and his team (the Block, the human equivalent of a tank, and Detective English, who looks like Robert Redford and suffers from bad dreams about Vietnam) are called into action … Fraleigh finds himself ensnarled in a network of relationships built on dirty money and dirty secrets, a network that reaches to the top at the state capitol and deep inside Fraleigh’s own police department …”

JOSEPH McNAMARA is chief of police in San Jose, California. He was born in New York City and, like his father, walked a beat in Harlem for the New York Police Department. McNamara is the only police chief in America with a Ph.D. from Harvard.