Welcome to Michael Jahn's New York

In 1982 I published Night Rituals, the first Bill Donovan Mystery. I based Donovan on a character I created a decade before for quite a different type of book, a nongenre novel. As a novice novelist, I found it easier to have a character pick up bodies than the detritus of his life, so he became a cop instead of a downward-spiralling newspaperman.

In Night Rituals, Donovan was a downward spiralling cop thirty-some years of age, one fighting to keep a lid on Broadway during the gun, drug, sex, and blood-fueled late 70s and early 80s. He drank and bullied his way through those torrid summer nights, and he cracked wise too, and you know where that comes from. He also loved and was loved by someone he never quite forgot, and therein hangs a tale that you will simply have to read the book to learn. In Donovan & Sons, he is a world famous New York City Police detective in late middle age who has just retired so he can devote all his energy and the rest of his life to finding a cure for the paralysis that keeps his adored young son in a wheelchair.

Father and son have just begun this quest in the deserted sub-sub-basement of the library at world famous Riverside University. Danny is using his motorized chair, "The Beast," in hot pursuit of a soccer ball, while his father pores over old records in search of a missing scientist who may hold the key to a cure. Naturally, a corpse occurs, sending father and son off on side journey helping old pal Brian Moskowitz, now heading the Department of Special Investigations, catch a killer. Along for the ride is Patrolman Lewis Rodriguez, Donovan's son from the aforementioned relationship. Along also are Donovan's old pals going back a quarter century, and and in Donovan & Sons, you may be forgiven for thinking that the entire population of the Upper West Side and West Harlem is in on a game that the grows bigger and bigger with every page.

Table of Contents -- Michael Jahn's New York