A cold case

Description

The first time Frank Koehler shot someone dead was in 1945, when he was only 16. In and out of prison several times for this and other crimes, he managed to keep his nose fairly clean through the 1960s. But in February 1970, he shot two men dead. There was a witness, a third man Koehler wounded; but the killer disappeared and eventually the NYPD closed the case on the assumption that Koehler is dead. Nearing retirement in 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney's office, decides to make one last effort either to catch Koehler or to find proof he's really dead, 27 years after the crime. From a prize-winning author and, in Elmore Leonard's words, "a knockout writer," comes a masterfully written and gripping tale of a determined investigator who reopens an unresolved case of double homicide in New York nearly thirty years after the brutal event. Philip Gourevitch vividly evokes the almost vanished gangland of New York in the sixties, and carries us deep into the lives and minds, the passions and perplexities, of two extraordinary men who embody opposing but quintessentially American codes of being―the lawman Andy Rosenzweig and the outlaw Frankie Koehler. With A Cold Case, Gourevitch masterfully transforms a criminal investigation into a searching literary reckoning with the urges that drive one man to murder and another to hunt murderers.

First Sentence

ON NOVEMBER 15, 1944, an Army deserter named Frank Gilbert Koehler was arrested for burglary in New York City.

Description

"A few years ago, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, was abruptly reminded of an old double homicide: a friend from his youth, a former prizefighter, had been murdered along with another man in 1970. It bothered Rosenzweig that the killer had eluded capture for nearly three decades. He resolved to track down the fugitive and - if he was still alive - to close the case.". "Philip Gourevitch brings together the story of Rosenzweig's pursuit with an account of the killer's criminal personality and his decades on the lam. A Cold Case carries us deep into the lives and minds, the passions and perplexities, of two extraordinary men who embody opposing but quintessentially American codes of being - that of the lawman and that of the outlaw. Set in a New York City milieu that has all but disappeared, and written with a keen ear for the vibrant idiom of the men and women who once peopled its streets, this is a book for our times, written with a force and immediacy that compel attention."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

Genres

• Case studies

Other Editions

• A cold caseFarrar, Straus and Giroux2001-01-01
• A Cold CaseFarrar Straus Giroux2001-07-01
• A Cold CaseHardcoverPicador2002-01-01
• A Cold CaseAudio CassettePublishing Mills2002-01-01
• A Cold CasePaperbackPicador2002-07-10
• A Cold CasePaperbackPicador2003-04-04