From an Independent Publishers Award-winner comes another “gritty and powerful crime novel” in the Coleridge Taylor series (Library Journal, starred review). On the eve of the US Bicentennial, newsman Coleridge Taylor is covering Operation Sail. While he enjoys watching New York Harbor teem with tall ships from all over the world, Taylor would still prefer to cover real stories, not fluff, and … real stories, not fluff, and New York City still has plenty of those in July of 1976.
Then one surfaces right in front of him. During the festivities, a housewife wearing bricks of heroin is fished out of the harbor. Convinced he’s stumbled upon a drug war between the Italian Mafia and a Chinese tong, Taylor is on fire once more. But as he blazes forward, flanked by his new girlfriend, ex-cop Samantha Callahan, his precious story grows ever more twisted and deadly. In his reckless search for the truth, he rattles Manhattan’s major drug cartels. Taylor must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the cost of being the next victim.
In the third of the Coleridge Taylor mysteries, “Zahradnik ratchets up the action, which quickens the pace and keeps readers engaged . . . A truly enjoyable read” (RT Book Reviews).
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When you pick up one of Rich Zahradnik’s Coleridge Taylor mysteries, get ready for a taut and gritty tale wrapped in the perfect time capsule — New York City in the 1970s and all it’s violent, bankrupt, crumbling and corrupt splendor.
It’s a bygone era before Google, smartphones and the 24-hour news cycle. It’s a time when cops and reporters had to use shoe leather and a telephone to do their sleuthing. And it’s a city on the verge of fiscal collapse and the hysteria of the Son of Sam killings.
The New York of this era is the magnificently rotten motherland for Taylor, a hard-nosed and marvelously obsessive police reporter who gets jicky when he hasn’t had a scoop in a couple of days. Zahradnik masterfully distills this throwback New York essence without turning his third Taylor mystery, A Black Sail, into a sepia-toned period piece.
The book’s title is partly a nod to the big event that serves as a backdrop — the parade of tall sailing ships in New York harbor to mark America’s bicentennial. But a black sail is also the lethal street trademark of potent Chinese heroin that sends Taylor on dark and difficult voyage, doggedly chasing a scoop that stays just out of reach and might just get him killed.
Taylor is an ink-stained hard news guy who hates the fluff story he’s been assigned to do on the tall ships and worries about his future working at a dinky city news service that gave him a job when his paper folded. Hard news comes knocking when the police boat he’s on fishes the body of a housewife out of the water with bricks of heroin wrapped around her waist.
The victim isn’t just any housewife — she’s the daughter of an Irish mobster and the wife of an Italian wiseguy’s son. The heroin is the stepped-on stuff of French Connection infamy, the brown junk the wiseguys sell. This is a murder meant to send a message and Taylor is convinced he has stumbled upon the opening shot of a war between the wiseguys and the Chinese tongs that want to muscle in on the city’s lucrative drug trade with China white branded with the stamp of a black sail.
Like a bloodhound tracking a strong scent, Taylor charges ahead, ignoring the rough terrain and frequently placing himself in harm’s way. Just as frequently, he’s bailed out by his tough, gun-toting girlfriend, an ex-cop named Samantha Callahan.
Taylor is a different kind of tough — as in, he’s a guy who can take a punch. Good thing, because he gets smacked around a lot by tong foot soldiers and wiseguys. He’s also menaced by crooked cops and a power-mad FBI honcho.
In the end, he learns the twisted truth about the housewife’s murder but can only write about bits and pieces of it. He survives, just barely, ready to chase his next scoop.
Jim Nesbitt is the author of two hard-boiled crime thrillers set in Texas and northern Mexico that feature battered but dogged Dallas PI Ed Earl Burch — The Last Second Chance and The Right Wrong Number. Both are available on Amazon.