Red Hook — Gabriel Cohen

Detective Jack Leightner of Brooklyn's South Homicide Task Force is the honcho brought in to give a hand to the local precinct. It is not only his years of experience scooping out murder scenes that will be called into play. This is the neighborhood where he grew up, the son of a dockworker, and it's the place that's left a hole in his heart: "Going back to Red Hook was love shot through with pain...." Even Raymond Chandler could not have envisioned streets this mean. As a former patrol partner of Jack's once described Red Hook, it was somewhere "you didn't have to look hard to find a place to piss out in the open."
The dead man wasn't mob-connected or even a petty criminal; he was a hard- working family man with a respectable job, running the service elevator in a fancy Manhattan Eastside building. As Jack Leightner attempts to discover what brought poor Tomas Berrios to his date with a lethally wielded knife, he is forced to confront his own ghosts and to deal with his own agonizing memories of a long-ago corpse with a similar wound.