REGGIE NADELSON

One of the best mysteries ever set in New York City, the last in an "archipelago trilogy" following 9/11, by the acclaimed author of Disturbed Earth. With his wife Maxine out of town, Artie Cohen is alone in Manhattan when his nephew Billy Farone is released from the young offenders' institution where he has been since he stabbed Heshey Shank to death. Artie is the one Billy wants to come home to—he's family and he's the only person Billy cares about; Artie wants desperately to believe that Billy is OK. As a plane crashes on Coney Island, bombs go off in London, and New York is shaken out of the sense that the bad times have passed, Artie begins to wonder. Over four days in Manhattan and on Staten Island there are signs that Shank's family wants Billy locked up for good, and that Billy's mother doesn't want him coming home either. The bodies begin to appear and Artie, up against a brick wall of his own hope and despair, doesn't know what or whom to believe. Reggie Nadelson has created in Artie Cohen one of mystery fiction's most interesting and complex characters: tough, unusually sensitive, deeply flawed and human.

Winter 2003: war is looming and New York is paralysed by the worst blizzard in years. Artie Cohen is called in to investigate a case: a pile of blood soaked children's clothes have been found on the beach in Brooklyn. Almost against his will, Artie finds himself drawn into a case that involves the death of a child and the unaccountable disappearance of another, all against the background of a city already stricken by fear. In his increasingly obsessive search for the missing child, Artie finds himself in the remote coastal suburbs of Brooklyn, among the Russian community he thought he had left behind him - and way out of his depth. Along the way he falls in love with one woman and is seduced by another, but little can calm his mind as his past comes back to haunt him…