One Foot Off The Gutter

The first novel in the Mission Quartet takes place in the late 1980s. Coddy, a policeman and the story's narrator, is 47 years old, underpaid, and overweight. His partner, Bellamy, lives out of their shared squad car. When a fellow officer is gunned down, a neighborhood of abandoned buildings becomes a war zone for transients, middle-class professionals, and thieves.