The Strangler » (Reprint)

William Landay is the author of the highly acclaimed Mission Flats, which was awarded the John Creasey Memorial Dagger as the best debut crime novel of 2003. A graduate of Yale University and Boston College Law School, he was an assistant district attorney before turning to writing. He lives in Boston, where he is at work on his next novel of suspense.

Boston, 1963. A city on 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. This is the electrifying backdrop of William Landay s magnificent new novel, a story of one Irish-American family, a city under siege, and the long shadow cast by the most infamous killer of his day...

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....

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

This is, finally, genre fiction, but of a high order. In the end, one of the brothers must perform some Rambo-style heroics to put things right, and a dying man must stay alive just long enough to gasp out a much-needed confession. Because Landay is writing about crime in working-class Boston, some reviewers have compared him to Dennis Lehane. That calls for clarification. The Strangler is superior to Lehane's early Kenzie-Gennaro novels, but it does not equal the rich prose and intense characterization of his Mystic River. Still, it's an impressive and satisfying performance, and Landay is a writer to watch.