Written at a tough point in his career and heavily influenced by Blaxploitation films and cop movies like Dirty Harry, Ted Lewis’s lone novel set in America is a nasty and brutal look at police corruption in the United States.
Roy Boldt is a bad cop. Corrupt. Violent. An extreme racist with a drinking problem. He is a man alone, outside of all the worlds he inhabits, and respected only by those who fear him. Boldt is too proud to bow down to the mob and too wicked to be a good cop.
Roy’s brother is the opposite: A seemingly shining light for good and a progressive political candidate. Roy thinks otherwise. He knows his brother too well. But none of that matters when an anonymous threat is handed over to the police. Someone is promising to kill Roy’s brother when he stops in town while on campaign.
What unfolds is Lewis’s most nasty and violent novel. Boldt navigates a brutal chain of night clubs, halfway houses, and mobbed-up hotels in order to find those plotting to kill his brother. In the half-light of this lurid underworld he stumbles onto a conspiracy that will put him at odds with just about everything and everyone.