Neil Hockaday 06 Grief Street

Hailed as “lively and literate” (The NewYorkTimes Book Review), the Neil Hockaday novels shine with Thomas Adcock’s "feverishly poetic imagination” (Kirkus Reviews). Now, in the gritty Manhattan streets of Hell’s Kitchen, Adcock’s doubting Irish-Catholic detective has more at stake than ever before: his family.

GRIEF STREET

It takes a “Kitchen kid” like Neil Hockaday to make a family life in the streets where Capone was born and the Westies once ruled. Despite self-exile from NYPD camaraderie following a brutality complaint against a fellow officer, Hock’s future looks bright as he and his wife, actress Ruby Flagg, prepare for their first child. But then, only a few blocks from their home, Hock and Ruby are drawn into a killer’s savage design.

The first victim is a charismatic young rabbi, slain before his own minyan. With mounting pressure to pull a madman out of the shadows, Hock investigates among the Kitchen’s dead and living—from the embittered Sergeant Joseph “King Kong” Kowalski to Father Gerald “Creepy" Morrison, a hermit Jesuit-priest. But vital clues are buried in Grief Street, the title of a disturbing play sent to Ruby—a drama that will violently unfold as Hock’s badge and bullets prove no match against the very essence of evil.

“Nobody writes hard-boiled better than Thomas Adcock....GRIEF STREET is his most ambitious, most harrowing, most redemptive novel yet. Adcock towers above the general throng like a Manhattan high-rise.”—Ian Rankin, author of Mortal Causes