The Middle of Nowhere — Bob Sloan

NYPD's Lenny Bliss's personal and professional lives collide in “a great noirish valentine to New York's denizens, high, middle, and low” (Richard Price).
 
Just when Detective Lenny Bliss is trying to find a little inner peace, he's got a floater in the East River. Along for the ride and working his last nerve is his wife, an aspiring writer researching a thriller about -- guess what -- a homicide detective. But another murder soon takes priority. A young man is found bludgeoned to death after a wild party in a posh Upper East Side town house -- a crime that could implicate his reckless teenage daughter, and Bliss himself should an incriminating surveillance video get leaked.
 
Being on the wrong side of an investigation yet again, Bliss is tangling with a blackmailing security officer, the victim's volatile father, a shady housekeeper, a philandering, potty-mouthed real estate mogul, and party crashers with hazy memories. As Bliss navigates a world of too much money and not enough sense, the clues to a killer's identity start to lead back to the banks of the East River. If he can believe his wife's amateur eye for detail.
 
“Sloan knows New York and New Yorkers right down to their socks, and his novels . . . hum with the brutal vitality of the city” (The Rocky Mountain News). This third book in the Lenny Bliss series “delivers humor, soul, and dark drama in equal measure” (Booklist). It's Sloane's “best yet” (Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall).