New York Chief-of-detectives Bert Farber investigates the murder of the city's police commissioner, with whose wife he once had an affair and whose job he now wants, even though two tough rivals stand in his way. 30,000 first printing. Former New York deputy police commissioner Daley, author of best sellers like A Faint Cold Fear (LJ 9/15/90), here aims a bullet straight at the heart of the commissioner himself. Chief of Detectives Bert Farber wants the murderer and the murdered man's job, but he might just end up as a suspect. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Daley--author of Prince of the City (1979), Tainted Evidence , and more than 20 other books--zeros in on the top echelon of the NYPD in this procedural that opens with the dawn discovery of the body of newly appointed commissioner Harry Chapman in a gutter miles from his Greenwich Village home with a single gunshot wound in his chest. Chief of detectives Bert Farber, who heads the murder investigation, was the dead man's first partner at NYPD, the initial stop on Chapman's coolly mapped route to the White House. After completing law school and marrying the young woman Farber loved, Chapman moved up to the DA's office, the Justice Department, and Congress; he then returned as a new mayor's appointee to run the NYPD and named Farber over more senior officers to head the city's 3,000 detectives. Farber is one of three NYPD candidates to succeed Chapman; his rivals do all they can to prevent his solving the case within the 10 days the law allows for the mayor to make his choice. Meanwhile, Farber's probe reveals Chapman as an indiscriminate womanizer and a flamboyant, arbitrary police executive: a manipulative, self-serving politician whose death all too many people had reason to celebrate. A tightly plotted, involving tale of law and disorder. Mary Carroll Which murder would New York City chief of detectives Bert P. Farber least like to be investigating? The police commissioner's, of course. Especially when the commissioner was the old partner who leapfrogged him into his present job over the senior competition- -now his competitors for the commissioner's job, who would like nothing better than to hamstring his investigation. Not that there was any love lost between Bert and the late Harry Chapman, who told his partner the first night on patrol about his timetable for advancement: two years as patrolman while finishing law school, three years in the DA's office, then Congress, the commissioner's job, then senator or governor, then the big one. He'd still be well within his timetable if he hadn't been shot in the heart one snowy morning on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But Bert, once he gets over a serious case of the flashbacks (he and Harry had romanced the same two women, marrying each other's dates), wonders why Harry was jogging miles from his Greenwich Village home. Despite interference from his rivals for Harry's job, he soon finds a love nest unlocked by the key he snitched from Harry's corpse. But which of Harry's secret women killed him--the flight attendant, the Mafia princess, or the inevitable police wife? Bert has swiped both the key and the fatal bullet without logging them in, broken into Harry's office to steal his little black book, seized a stained suit of clothes without a warrant, and hidden in a ladies' room to interrogate a suspect while her lawyer waited back in his office. Given these breaches of procedure, what kind of case will the DA be able to make against the perp, and what will Bert's reputation, to say nothing of his chances for promotion, look like when the dust has settled? Not up to the level of Tainted Evidence (1993)--those long flashbacks, fueled by nothing more than a heap of dramatic irony, make the first half of the novel slow going. But once it builds up steam, a powerful portrait of a bulldog cop who doesn't even know himself why he won't let go. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.