The Ninth Step: A Jack Leightner Crime Novel

A family tragedy comes back to haunt Jack Leightner in Cohen's less than inspired fourth crime novel featuring the Brooklyn homicide detective (after 2009's Neptune Avenue ). In 1965, Jack watched as his 13-year-old brother, Petey, was stabbed to death by an older black teenager, who had demanded that they hand over a case of liquor. Four decades later, the killer, Darnel Teague Jr., who was never caught, shows up at Leightner's front door and confesses to the crime as part of his recovery from alcohol abuse. Darnel further upends the policeman's world by adding that an Italian-American man, a stranger whose name Darnel never learned, hired him to teach the Leightner brothers a lesson. A fresh case—a bludgeoning murder in a deli apparently committed by a terrorist—distracts Jack from trying to identify the man out to get him and Petey back in '65. The truth behind the fatal mugging may strike some readers as a letdown. (June)