The Ninth Step (Jack Leightner Series #4) Book

Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner is at home enjoying a quiet day off when a stranger appears at his door and completely overturns his understanding of his own past. The following day, what looks like a mundane killing in a Brooklyn deli takes a bizarre turn when a crew of Homeland Security agents suddenly show up wearing anti-radiation gear. Soon Jack is embroiled in two dangerous and far-reaching investigations:  a hunt for the Pakistani-American deli killer, who may be a member of a terrorist cell planning a new attack on New York, and an inquiry into his own family’s history on the Mafia-dominated waterfront of Red Hook in the 1960s.

At the same time, Jack is trying to figure out if he can forgive his former love Michelle. Throw in a couple of incredible (and true stories) that transport the reader to the Gulf of Aden in the age of modern pirates and to New York Harbor back in 1943, and you have the ingredients for a fascinating and thrilling new crime novel from Edgar Award finalist Gabriel Cohen.

Publishers Weekly

A family tragedy comes back to haunt Jack Leightner in Cohen's less than inspired fourth crime novel featuring the Brooklyn homicide detective (after 2009's Neptune Avenue). In 1965, Jack watched as his 13-year-old brother, Petey, was stabbed to death by an older black teenager, who had demanded that they hand over a case of liquor. Four decades later, the killer, Darnel Teague Jr., who was never caught, shows up at Leightner's front door and confesses to the crime as part of his recovery from alcohol abuse. Darnel further upends the policeman's world by adding that an Italian-American man, a stranger whose name Darnel never learned, hired him to teach the Leightner brothers a lesson. A fresh case—a bludgeoning murder in a deli apparently committed by a terrorist—distracts Jack from trying to identify the man out to get him and Petey back in '65. The truth behind the fatal mugging may strike some readers as a letdown. (June)