The Beat

Detroit, 1960. A dead man in an alley. Shoes too clean for the filth around him.

John Braun is a Big Four cruiser cop - four men in an unmarked sedan, rolling through frozen neighborhoods, being large and visible and discouraging. He's not a detective. He's not supposed to think.

But when a body shows up behind a bar on Medbury Street and the homicide detective closes it as a mugging in eight hours, John sees what the detective doesn't - or won't. The dead man was placed, not dumped. And his shoes are screaming.

John is a former Marine forward observer with a brain that reads terrain the way a mathematician reads equations, and this terrain is wrong. His unauthorized investigation leads from a widow's kitchen in Hamtramck to the shadow of the Masonic Temple, from a retired cop's careful silence to a church filing cabinet holding the proof that the institution he serves has been bought.

The truth will cost him his squad, his standing, and his ignorance. It won't give any of them back.

The Beat is the first novel in The Braun Cases, a five-book series following John Braun through 1960s Detroit.