Sooner or later, every cop must decide whether getting the job done means crossing a line that could cost him his career, his freedom, and even his soul. And for those who patrol the streets of Philadelphia, that line sometimes seems all too easy to cross. When a street cop is killed in a rundown crack house, his indignant fellow cops predictably start rounding up every young black man in sight. Even after the cop's sergeant, Eddie North, discovers the Mafia may have been behind the murder, tension between the police and the black community continues to escalate.

Fueled by the surrounding discord, Eddie becomes obsessed with taking the mob boss down for good. And he's getting help from an unexpected source — the slain cop's sister. Also a police officer, she is going undercover as the mob boss's lover to get the inside scoop on her brother's murder. But infiltrating the mob is no easy task, and Eddie watches in jealous alarm as she starts slipping precariously into the Mafia life.

As the city heads toward a racial conflagration and street cops go to war with the mob, Eddie discovers what can happen when people — particularly cops — try to create and inflict their own ideas of justice. With dead-on insight into the private world of the police force — the unexpected, terrifying danger, as well as the comic moments — Scott Flander takes the reader right onto the streets and reveals, in an unforgettable cityscape, the powerful forces that can tear apart the urban fabric.