Synopsis
Boston, 1963. A city on edge. On street corners, newsboys hawk the shocking headline: KENNEDY IS DEAD. In the city s underworld, a mob war rages. But what terrifies Bostonians most is the mysterious killer who has already claimed a dozen victims, a murderer whose name is indelibly linked to their city: the Boston Strangler. This is the electrifying backdrop of William Landay s magnificent new novel, a story of one Irish-American family, a city under siege, and the long shadow cast by the most infamous killer of his day...
For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. They are simply on different sides of it. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop whose gambling habits--fast women, slow horses drag him down into the city s gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer working for an ambitious attorney general, he finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force....
The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson
This is, finally, genre fiction, but of a high order. In the end, one of the brothers must perform some Rambo-style heroics to put things right, and a dying man must stay alive just long enough to gasp out a much-needed confession. Because Landay is writing about crime in working-class Boston, some reviewers have compared him to Dennis Lehane. That calls for clarification. The Strangler is superior to Lehane's early Kenzie-Gennaro novels, but it does not equal the rich prose and intense characterization of his Mystic River. Still, it's an impressive and satisfying performance, and Landay is a writer to watch.