Denny Malone is an awesome cop, a cool sleek law-enforcement machine, King of North Manhattan. He's also crooked as hell and sitting on a small mountain of drugs ripped off from a dealer at the cost of the life of a member of his team. It's a long hot summer and racial tensions are close to boiling point in the city. Denny is being squeezed by the Feds but he's playing them and won't sell out his fellow cops. However he can't stop his world from slowly crumbling into chaos and betrayal, just as the city itself is on the brink of a race war.

Winslow's hypnotic, hard-boiled staccato prose propels the reader through this intense portrayal of personal and public corruption at a ferocious clip, vividly bringing the city and the cops and the criminals to life with ferocious energy and righteous anger. Riveting.