When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

In the dark days, in a sad and lonely place, ex-cop Matt Scudder is drinking his life away -- and doing "favors" for pay for his ginmill cronies. But when three such assignments flow together in dangerous and disturbing ways, he'll need to change his priorities from boozing to surviving.

Between morning coffees laced with bourbon at Armstrong's, he agrees to help a saloonkeeper buy back a stolen set of skimmed ledgers. An illegal after-hours joint on Fifty-first Street loses its cash box to masked gunmen.

A telephone salesman in Bay Ridge wants him to nose around a ransacked house where a woman was stabbed to death in her bed. Working the city's bars to find the truth will cost more than cash.

• Private Investigator: Operating without a badge or a license from a room on West Fifty-seventh Street, Scudder takes his pay in cash envelopes and quietly slips a tenth of every fee into church poor boxes.
• Hard Boiled: A bloody stickup at an illegal after-hours club leaves two bullets in the tin ceiling and empties a donation jar meant for political prisoners in Northern Ireland.
• Crime Thriller: An extortionist demands fifty thousand dollars for a tavern’s stolen ledgers, forcing a tense night payoff in a shuttered Bensonhurst church basement.
• Morally Grey Hero: Bound by barroom code, Scudder weighs whether to hunt down the stickup crew for a ten-thousand-dollar bounty or let the neighborhood settle its own scores.
• Also by This Author: The Sins of the Fathers, Hit Man and Burglars Can't Be Choosers.