NYPD Detective Roland Means never learned to play by the rules. On the street they call him "Mean Mr. Means," a name he earned in blood and brutality. He follows his own code of justice, a code that has barred him more than once from the streets he patrols with a vengeance. His last collar may not have cost him his badge, but it's landed him behind a desk in the ballistics lab, where he presides over a sea of mindnumbing paperwork. Unrepentant, he languishes there until Vanessa Bouton, a black captain determined to be the city's first female police commissioner, offers him a ticket out. But liberation has a price: he must work for the ambitious, by-the-book Bouton. The case Bouton has her eye on has set the city aflame. A series of male prostitute murders has baffled the department and sex-crime experts alike, and the high-profile news coverage is turning into a public humiliation for the force. Bouton makes no bones about her interest in the case - she wants to add another notch to her resume - but, as a stranger to the streets, she knows she cannot do it alone. At first, things go as planned. Means gets the lowdown on the street, and Bouton combs through the evidence. But when she brings a psychologist on board to map out the background of the killer, the case takes an unexpected twist for Means. The killer's childhood dangerously mirrors Means's own tormented past. A Good Day to Die brings Roland Means face to face with his demons and, in a stunning conclusion, demands he use them to triumph over a cold-blooded psychopath. From a writer who captures the raw energy of New York City like no one else, this searing novel of discovery and rage is clearly Stephen Solomita's best work to date.