In 1950s New York, Detective Michael Cassidy investigates a number of bizarre deaths while trying to avoid being assassinated himself. New York, 1956. A couple walking through Central Park on a fall evening are confronted by a hansom cab driver, only to kill him and casually walk away. Who are the couple and did they know the man? A man commits suicide by throwing himself through a hotel window. His colleagues claim he was depressed - but is there more to it than that? Before Detective Michael Cassidy even begins investigating these cases, he is threatened by an unknown man - the reasons for which are unclear. Are all three incidents connected? If so, how, and will Cassidy live long enough to find out before his would-be assassin claims his life?

In the high desert above San Diego, on the U.S.-Mexico border, sits the tiny, forgotten town of Jacumba, CA, a place where ghosts of failed attempts to cross linger like the gray chill after a winter rain. Camouflaged against the rocks, a coyote name Wiley cautiously lingers near the Bridge of Sighs with six exhausted Mexican nationals. Time stands still for this small group as they breathlessly wait for a fast moving, teal green SUV to flash its lights three times just beyond the bridge. In an Indian casino seven miles away, Charlie and Denice DeVille live la vida loca as professional gamblers until they receive the call to GO! The hand-off from Wiley transpires flawlessly, and within minutes Charlie, Denice, and their six frightened passengers head north, navigating the gauntlet from San Diego to L.A. in a twenty-first century underground railroad, during a routine run they call the Jacumba Connection.

New York City in 1954. The Cold War is heating up. Senator Joe McCarthy is running a witch hunt for Communists in America. The newly formed CIA is fighting a turf battle with the FBI to see who will be the primary US intelligence agency. And the bodies of murdered young men are turning up in the city. Michael Cassidy has an unusual background for a New York cop. His father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, is a successful Broadway producer. His godfather is Frank Costello, a Mafia boss. Cassidy also has an unusual way of going about the business of being a cop—maybe that's why he threw a fellow officer out a third story window of the Cortland Hotel. Cassidy is assigned to the case of Alexander Ingram, a Broadway chorus dancer found tortured and dead in his apartment in Hell's Kitchen. Complications grow as other young men are murdered one after the other. And why are the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia interested in the death of a Broadway gypsy?Meanwhile, a...

Night Work: the second book in David C. Taylor's transporting historical crime fiction series.Michael Cassidy, a New York cop plagued by dreams that sometimes come true, escorts a prisoner accused of murder to Havana on the cusp of Fidel Castro's successful revolution against the Batista dictatorship. After delivering the man to La Cabaña prison and rescuing Dylan McCue, a Russian KGB agent and his now-married former lover, from her scheduled execution, Cassidy returns to New York and retreats into the comforts of alcohol and sex.The arrival of Fidel Castro in New York three months later complicates the cop's life once more. Cassidy's investigation of a young man's murder in Central Park is interrupted when he is assigned to Castro's protective detail. Castro has many enemies. American mobsters who have been run out of Havana, businessmen who worry about their investments in Cuba, and members of Batista's secret police all want him dead. Cassidy is already...