Dorothy Uhnak is one of America's best-known crime novelists. After more than a decade as a New York City police detective, she first achieved fame as the author of Policewoman, and followed that success with a series of police novels - the New York Times bestsellers Law and Order and The Investigation among them - works equalled in their authenticity and popularity only by those of Joseph Wambaugh.Now, with The Ryer Avenue Story, her first novel in nearly a decade, Dorothy Uhnak has crafted a novel bolder and more powerful than any she has written before, a saga that reaches beyond the murder at its center toward greater truths about family, guilt, and ambition. It opens with a single moment of combustion, on a winter night in 1935 in a Bronx neighborhood, when a blow from a shovel fells a man in the street. From the scene flee six children, any of whom might have loosed the fatal strike. Weeks later, one of their fathers is executed for the crime.Four decades later, the Ryer Avenue gang - grown now, each an adult who has fulfilled his or her childhood promise - gathers again. Megan Magee, Charley and Eugene O'Brien, Ben Herskel, and Dante D'Angelo - the group is missing only Willie Paycek, the little hanger-on who never fit in. The occasion: That fatal blow from forty years ago is about to come crashing down upon them, taking their lives and futures with it - and this time, Willie is calling the shots.A novel of stunning power, The Ryer Avenue Story marks the return of one of our most gripping storytellers. Read Less