He steps out of prison into the blinding light of a New York afternoon, free for the first time in years but tethered to the only world he knows. Jim Durkin dreams of reinvention, of becoming an inventor, but the city has other plans. In a grimy oyster bar, a corpulent stranger offers him work in the shadowy realm of wire-tapping, and despite every instinct telling him to run, Durkin listens. Then comes Frances Candler, a woman tangled in the dangerous world of gambling, and suddenly the stakes are no longer just economic. Stringer writes with unflinching precision about a man trying to escape his past while the criminal underworld tightens its grip. The wire-tapping scheme is merely the mechanism; what truly fascinates is the moral corrosion and desperate hope coursing beneath. This is early crime fiction at its most psychologically acute, a lost novel that anticipates the noir tradition by decades.
