Mean Business on North Ganson Street: A Novel

After a businessman kills himself following a brief, harsh conversation with detective Jules Bettinger, the decorated but unkind policeman is forced to relocate his family from Arizona to Victory, Missouri. This economically collapsed rustbelt city has been deteriorating for over four decades, with streets littered with dead pigeons and a ratio of seven hundred criminals to every law enforcer. Bettinger is assigned to an understaffed precinct and partnered with a demoted, boorish corporal. He investigates a double homicide in which two police officers were killed and mutilated. His search for answers leads him to the city's margins and into the histories of his fellow officers—men who brutally assaulted a local drug dealer, leaving him disabled. As Bettinger digs deeper, he begins to suspect the double homicide is not an isolated crime but the beginning of a series of targeted executions against police officers.