GRIEF STREET - Hardcover

Adcock, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671519867 ISBN 13: 9780671519865

Publisher: Atria, 1997

Synopsis

Self-exiled from NYPD camaraderie after lodging a brutality complaint against a fellow officer, Detective Neil Hockaday anticipates the birth of his first child and finds his family targeted by a determined killer

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Reviews

It's open season on the religious community of Hell's Kitchen. The touchingly ecumenical killer--described by 14 eyewitnesses only as a shadow that stinks--begins by stabbing and scalping Rabbi Marvin Paznik on Yom Hashoah (which also happens to be Good Friday) and then proceeds to shoot down seven Catholics enacting the Way of the Cross. The murders eerily echo the plot of Grief Street, a play dealing with the Kitchen of a hundred years earlier, whose shyly anonymous author has sent a copy to actress Ruby Flagg. Even before the rash of killings (there'll be more), Ruby is interested in the play, but her husband, Detective Neil Hockaday of the Street Crimes Unit, reacts like a snake to a charmer. As Hockaday, the foul-weather Catholic recognized by Rabbi Paznik's congregation as a rodef shalom, or pursuer of peace, burrows deeper into the neighborhood's secrets, he finds just what you'd expect from New York's meanest streets--bent cops, wannabe informers, indignant prostitutes and their rabbity clients, rats of every species--and what you'd expect only from the feverishly poetic imagination of Adcock (Devil's Heaven, 1995, etc.): layers upon layers of historical vice and Hockaday's own troubled memories, and the looming figure of Sgt. Joseph (``King Kong'') Kowalski, the cop Hockaday's ratted out for brutality who just won't fade away. Adcock fills the shell of the detective story to the bursting point with Catholic guilt, self-laceration, and spiritual crisis, with a magnificent starring role for Hell's Kitchen. Like-minded readers won't expect him to tie up the loose ends with too neat a flourish. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With his drinking days behind him, his marriage to actress Ruby Flagg flourishing, and the excitement of a baby on the way, NYPD homicide detective Neil Hockaday is feeling better about the world and his place in it. That changes quickly when a young rabbi is brutally butchered in front of 14 horrified witnesses, none of whom can identify the assailant. Then Hock notices an eerie similarity between aspects of the murder and the plot of a play Ruby is reading by an anonymous author. Taking his clues from the play, Hock descends into an all-encompassing evil that stirs deep-seated fears in his Irish Catholic heart. Hock knows there are no bogeymen in the real world, but he also knows how the human mind can feed on pain and twist it into unspeakable cruelty. This sixth Hockaday novel follows the extraordinary journey of a man who is forced to test his faith in God, his partner, himself, and above all, the redemptive power of the human experience. Wes Lukowsky

Detective Neil Hockaday and his pregnant actress wife, Ruby, continue to live in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen despite its uncertain reputation and sometimes violence. When a mysterious "shadow" viciously murders a rabbi friend there, Hockaday begs to work the case; however, the related gunning down of several men in a religious procession leads the mayor to ask Neil to take charge. The text provides historical background on Hell's Kitchen, sinister otherworldly villains, and typical police department in-fighting and corruption. Solid work; of special interest to series fans (e.g., Drown All the Dogs, LJ 1/94).
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671519867
• ISBN 13: 9780671519865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336