Sea of Green

Sea of Green is Thomas Adcock's 1989 debut, introducing NYPD Detective Neil Hockaday in a Hell's Kitchen that no longer exists. Hockaday is Irish, alcoholic in remission, and intimately familiar with the neighborhood's working geography in a way the white-shoe detective squads downtown will never understand. The case is a series of apparent random murders that are not random.

Adcock won the Edgar for one of the later books in this series and you can see the talent that earned it here. The Hell's Kitchen of 1989 (the residential SROs, the Polish bars, the Irish wakes, the early gentrification creep) is rendered with the kind of love and exhaustion that only locals have. Hockaday's investigation involves community institutions the modern crime novel rarely engages with.

The voice is the achievement. Hockaday narrates in a particular Irish-Catholic-New-York register that has dignity and weight and that Adcock sustains across all his books. Four stars. An undersung 80s/90s procedural that deserves a wider audience.