Gritty gumshoe

Saints of New York

Monday morning. Sick head. Rough gut. NYPD detective Frank Parrish has just failed to prevent a junkie from slitting the throat of his girlfriend with a straight razor, and, for an encore, doing likewise to himself — “like pulling the whipcord on a chainsaw”.

The blood, the gore, the waste of human life goes with the territory, and the territory is a desolate wasteland where life is cheap, drugs and sex the lingua franca of the rancid social underbelly, and redemption a daily aspiration of the New York homicide detective.