Neil Hockaday, New York City police detective, shamrock Catholic, and veteran philosophizer, returns from his troubling pilgrimage to his ancestral home with one new bride, many old ghosts, and a terrible thirst. Only the rough grace of Davy Mogaill, his former Captain and reformed drinking partner, saves Hock from drowning at the bar of Angelo's Ebb Tide. Now, off the bottle and back on his feet, Hock's looking at an indefinite furlough from the force - while his beloved Ruby Flagg prepares to resume her Madison Avenue career, and walk the man she loves back from the edge. But Ruby's first day on the job unexpectedly plunges Hock back into his own working world, to do what he does best - solve the city's ugliest crimes. And they don't get much uglier than the murder of ad agency exec Freddy Crosby. Naked, save for the leather bondage hood sheathing his head, the partner in Ruby's high-powered firm is found mutilated and crucified on the floor of his Upper East Side apartment. It's a scene that would turn even the toughest cop's stomach. But what turns Hock's head is the presence of "King Kong" Kowalski - infamously sadistic sergeant at Manhattan's sex crimes squad, and self-appointed scourge of the gay community. When the dead man's secret after-hours life as a drag queen is revealed, Hock can't help wondering if the grisly murder is connected to the spate of homosexual deaths around the city being written off by the police as suicides. And he can't help worrying about Kowalski's emergence from the shadows of the graveyard shift into the limelight of a controversial investigation...like a fat, mean shark in a feeding frenzy.Ordered to steer clear by his C.O., Hock joins the investigation via the back door, as a private eye. From the Four Seasons lunch crowd to the Metropolitan Opera to the extravagant gay nightlife scene, from Ruby's corporate world to New York's Russian mafia to the downstairs gloom of a Lincoln Center sex club, Hock is wading ever deeper into a twisted case of vengeance and serial slaughter. Fighting his day by day battle to stay dry as the tide of blood rises, Hock knows he's surely no saint. But as he ventures into places where more than angels fear to tread, he hopes to God he won't become a martyr. Read Less