NASTY CUTTER

A fourth demonstration that even if you take Raymond Donne out of the NYPD, you can’t take him out of the criminal action in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.

When the benefit honoring attorney Marty Stover’s charitable work as founder of Bridges to Success is derailed by the guest of honor’s death, Ray is right on the scene, standing outside the men’s room where Marty, stabbed in the thigh, staggered to bleed copiously out. Ray’s namesake uncle, chief of detectives for the NYPD, is convinced that his nephew’s experience as dean at a local middle school makes him the perfect person to interview Maeve Barrett, the young coat check girl, and from that point on, Ray (Dead Red, 2015, etc.) improbably gets pulled deeper and deeper into a case he has no business touching. He phones his girlfriend, reporter Allison Rogers, to make sure she gets the scoop. He takes along his cop junkie friend Edgar Martinez O’Brien when he goes to visit Marty Stover Jr., who’s reported a break-in at his father’s office, and then, having lectured Edgar on his law-breaking folly in downloading the contents of the victim’s computer, helps himself to the fruits of the poisonous tree. He asks questions about a mysterious painting that somehow passed from the parents of Ray’s student Hector Robles to Marty’s possession and more questions about the 20-year-old case in which Marty Sr.’s client Billy Taylor pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault, incurring the well-heeled wrath of Billy’s twin, Bobby, who retired from baseball to run a string of car dealerships and sit on the board of Bridges to Success.

A child could see where many of these complications are going, but the ex-cop hero takes quite a bit longer. Maybe the NYPD didn’t lose such a great investigator with his departure after all.