A police captain and lead investigator for the chief of New York's detectives, Nora Riter is smart, strong-willed, and beautiful--a rising star. But her personal life is threatening to send her career into a nosedive. Struggling to reestablish controlboth professionally and personally-she takes on a case that leads her to the meanest of Brooklyn's streets, the domain of Blaze Longo, a Red Hook loan shark and pathological killer in steel-toed boots. Longo's reputation for cruelty and sadistic behavior strikes terror in the hearts of even the most hardened tough guys. Up until now, he has remained untouchable. But Blaze has never encountered the like of Captain Nora Riter.
But she needs help, and it's coming in the form of a most unlikely ally: good-looking sometime actor, always streetwise Nicky the Hawk Ossman. Ossman knows Brooklyn's Red Hook better than anyone and he has good reasons to want the psychopathic Blaze oft the streets. There's Nicky's adopted sevenyear-old son, Tino, and a light-headed prostitute cousin named Irma, both of whom share Nicky's life-and neither can make it through this life without him. Therefore, a stretch in prison for assaulting a vice cop--a very real prospect proposed to him by a determined Nora Riter-is unthinkable. So he agrees to go undercover to nail the madman Blaze.
Stalking Longo is perilous work, and Nicky soon wants out. Nora, however, wants Longo in the worst way. Circumstance has thrown Nora and Nicky together in this very dangerous game, which is smelling increasingly of secrecy, lies, and betrayal emanating from the top levels of the department. But they can survive the coming conflagration if they are willing to break all their own rules. There is one busted commandment, however, that could cost them everything: the unwritten law that says a cop and her informant must never get romantically involved.
