Tom Wade is a determined cop and a relentless man of action - equal parts Harry Bosch and Jack Reacher - who battles police corruption and a ruthless crime lord, against impossible odds. Once part of King City’s elite Major Crimes Unit, Sergeant Wade secretly worked with the Justice Department to nail seven of his fellow detectives for corruption…costing him his marriage and making him a pariah in the police department. So he’s exiled by his superiors to one of King City’s most notorious and violent neighborhoods - a poverty-stricken, gang-ridden hellhole known as Darwin Gardens. It’s a de facto death sentence. But Wade doesn’t fight the potentially fatal reassignment.

With just two rookie officers to help him, Wade does the only thing he’s wired to do: his job. He moves into an apartment above the substation and then, vastly out-numbered and out-gunned by local gangs, sets out to enforce the law anyway with courage and an unwavering moral code, slowly earning the respect of his newbie officers, the neighborhood residents, and even Darwin Gardens’ most feared crime lord.

When a young woman’s brutally beaten corpse is dumped in a Darwin Gardens parking lot, Wade uncovers a history of similar killings ignored for years by a police department more interested in politics than justice. So he embarks on an investigation that leads from the squalor of the inner city to the manicured enclaves of the privileged, revealing the complex, sordid, and deadly ways that the two worlds are intertwined….and making him even more hated by those determined to crush him. But for Wade the only thing that matters, in the words of his father, is “what you stand for and how strong you stand for it.” With that motto long ago etched into his psyche, there’s no backing down; there’s only what’s right - even if it means sacrificing his life.

King City brings the sensibility of a classic western to the contemporary crime novel, and the result is an exhilarating read that reinvigorates a tired genre.