Brilliant, decisive, and hard-charging, Deputy Inspector Allhoff was the NYPD's ace detective until bullets from a mobster's machine gun robbed him of his legs, his career, and-in the opinion of an associate-his sanity. Yet Allhoff was too good a man to be put out to pasture, so New York's police commissioner found a way to keep him employed and refer to him such cases as the department couldn't or wouldn't handle. Confined to a wheelchair and operating from a seedy tenement flat, Allhoff is assisted by two cops: Battersly, the rookie patrolman whose brief moment of cowardice cost the...