Former Detective Tom Newberry was finding retirement a difficult adjustment. His old NYPD partner Barry Noonan scoffed when Newberry told him he was getting closer to identifying the madman who had gunned down six unsuspecting women on the streets of Northern Queens. "Give it up," Noonan pleaded. "Our job is done. Let the new breed figure this one out. Our days of solving crimes are behind us, now. We're not the city's watchdogs anymore." Newberry soon clashed with Sergeant Ray Wheeler, the man Chief of Detectives Frank Armstrong appointed to spearhead the special task force he set up to...

Don Collins is the author of "Old Watchdogs," an aclaimed first novel where he introduces Tom Newberry and Barry Noonan, two hardnosed former detectives from NYPD's Fugitive Warrant Squad. When Newberry retired he opened a detective agency just to have something to do. But when a serial killer terrorized unsuspecting women in northern Queens he picked up the scent and he and Noonan joined the chase. Newberry's relentless, unconventional, and often maddening style brought criticism from high ranking police brass. But he had done his homework and, in time, his detractors had to admit Newberry...

Two months after being ambushed in his own living room and losing his fiance, and two close detective friends in a shootout with the brother of Mexican Mafia kingpin Miguel Placido, Kenny Marquette was released from Ashford General Hospital. Going back to the house he had called home for the past dozen years was not an option. The place held too many bad memories. When he told his former boss, Peter Grafton, that he was thinking of relocating in New York, Grafton gave him the keys to his spacious Upper East Side condo and told him to stay as long as he wanted. Shortly after arriving in the...