The Strangler

Summary

This story is set Boston in the year 1963. It is a city on the edge. On street corners, newsboys hawk the shocking headline: Kennedy Is Dead. In the city's underworld, a mob war rages. But what terrifies Bostonians most is the mysterious killer who has already claimed a dozen victims, a murderer whose name is indelibly linked to their city: the Boston Strangler. For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. They are simply on different sides of it. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop whose gambling habits - fast women, slow horses - drag him down into the city's gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer working for an ambitious attorney general, he finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force. And Ricky, the devil-may-care youngest son, floats above the fray as an expert burglar - until the Strangler strikes too close to home. As Joe's mob debts close in around him...and Michael becomes snarled in a murder investigation gone very wrong...and Ricky is hunted by both sides of the law...the three brothers - and the women who love them - are forced to take sides. Now, each must look deeper into a killer's murderous rage, into their family's own lethal secrets, and into the one death that has changed them forever. As William Landay's complex, compassionate, and terrifying novel builds to a climax, two mysteries will collide - and a shattering truth will be revealed.