Boston, 1963. A city on edge. On street-corners, newsboys hawk the shocking headline: Kennedy Is Dead. The West End lies in ruins, razed to the ground to make way for gleaming new buildings. 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 swirling 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...

THE 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 habit — fast women, slow horses — draws him into the city's gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer for an ambitious Attorney General, Michael finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force. And Ricky, the devil-may-care youngest son, floats above the fray as a professional 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 one another's sides. Now, each must look deeper into a killer's murderous rage, into their family's own deadly secrets, and into the one death that has changed each of them forever. As William Landay's electrifying novel builds to a climax, bonds will be broken, the Strangler case will violently unravel, and two mysteries will converge and collide — until a shattering truth is revealed.