Drop Dead Punk

Coleridge Taylor is searching for his next scoop on the police beat. The Messenger-Telegram reporter has a lot to choose from on the crime-ridden streets of New York City in 1975. One story outside his beat is grabbing all the front page glory: New York teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, and President Ford just told the city, as the Daily News so aptly puts it, "e;drop dead."e;Taylor's situation is nearly as desperate. His home is a borrowed dry-docked houseboat, his newspaper may also be on the way out, and his drunk father keeps getting arrested. A source sends Taylor down to Alphabet City, where he finds two dead bodies: a punk named Johnny Mort and a cop named Robert Dodd. Each looks too messed up to have killed the other, so Taylor starts asking around. The punk was a good kid, the peace-loving guardian angel of the neighborhood's stray dogs. What led him to mug a woman at gunpoint? And why is officer Samantha Callahan being accused of leaving her partner to die, even though she insists the police radio misled her?It's hard enough being a female in the NYPD only five years after women were assigned to patrol, and now the department wants to throw her to the wolves. That's not going to happen-not if Taylor can help it. As he falls for Samantha-a beautiful, dedicated second-generation cop-he realizes he's too close to his story. Officer Callahan is a target, and Taylor is standing between her and some mighty big guns.