WALK A WINTER BEACH

After 20 years with the NYPD Lieutenant Jake Ryan is made the new head of a special homicide team dubbed Ryan's Raiders. And Jake is soon very personally involved in a homicide: his wife Nora is shot to death in a revenge setup aimed at Jake. The culprit? Tommy Angel, whom Jake had sent up to Attica for molesting a minor (which ruined Tommy's standing with the sexually conservative Mafia). So, following a lead, Jake heads out to Montauk Point in the winter--where, tracking down Tommy, he'll meet Scotty Stanton, who's starting up a service ferrying passengers about Long Island in her monoplane. Among Scotty's clients: her Montauk neighbor Max Landau, a top Mafioso. And the wretched Tommy Angel is hiding out in the boat-house on Landau's palatial estate. Jake and Scotty fall in love; Jake tries to corner Tommy and get a man-to-man confession from him. But then, when Tommy attempts to rape Scotty, Jake kills him--and the novel's last section drags on into the departmental investigation of this legally iffy killing. An oddly ill-paced mix of police-melodrama and romance: passable entertainment from the author of The Cuppi.