The Sins of the Fathers

Her alleged murderer—a minister's son—hanged himself in his jail cell. Patrolmen found twenty-year-old Richard Vanderpoel running through the West Village with blood on his clothes, raving on the pavement. The law is satisfied.

The case is closed. But the dead girl's fatherhas come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.

Cale Hanniford drove down from Utica with two thousand dollars for an ex-cop who works without a license. He wants to know how his daughter paid rent on a Bethune Street floor-through without holding a job.

Nobody wants the file reopened. Sifting through old postcards and unlisted numbers, Scudder retraces her path through Greenwich Village to find what really happened behind that locked door.

• Morally Grey Hero: Haunted by the stray bullet that ended a young girl's life and cost him his badge, Matthew Scudder spends his afternoons nursing bourbon-laced coffee at Armstrong's and dropping tithes into church poor boxes.
• Crime Noir: The investigation plunges into a shadowy 1970s Manhattan, where a college dropout from Indiana shared a comfortable home with an antique shop clerk while entertaining wealthy older clients.
• Police Procedural: Scudder leans on old precinct contacts like Lieutenant Eddie Koehler and confronts rookie patrolman Lewis Pankow to uncover the suppressed details of a grisly Bethune Street crime scene.
• Character-Driven Crime: Tracking down former roommate Marcia Maisel in Westchester unearths the hidden campus scandal that drove Wendy into the city and set her on a destructive trajectory.
• Also by This Author: Hit Man, Burglars Can't Be Choosers and Hit and Run.