The streets of New York are never safe, but the release of James Leo Motley, a psychopath who went down swearing revenge on Matt Scudder on all who knew him, means death is out there looking for a victim. No-one is safe - friends, lovers or just those unfortunate enough to share the same name.

The wife of Kheran Khoury, heroin wholesaler, is killed after he haggles over the price of her ransom. With the help of two computer geniuses, a streetwise punk, drug lords and his friend, ex-cop Scudder, they track the killers through the back streets of Brooklyn.

Battling the bottle, Scudder finds that in the mean streets of New York staying sober and alive isn't easy - not for him, not for the prostitute who wanted out and got herself slashed to ribbons, and not for a pimp named Chance who's betting his life that Scudder can't find the killer.

In this reissue, anonymous letter writer, Will of the People, targets criminals and evil-doers the law cannot reach and kills them. His latest target has got one too many killers off a murder rap and so Attorney Whitfield, wanting the most stubborn PI in the Big Apple to watch his back, calls ex-acoholic, ex-cop Matt Scudder.

It isn't called Hell's Kitchen for nothing - a gritty landscape of dark doorways and dirty alleys inhabited by crack addicts and the homeless. For Matt Scudder, it's a city gone mad, but a city he can't leave as he's been hired to find missing would-be actress Paula Hoeldtke.

When Yuppie lawyer Glenn Holtzmann sits in his penthouse gazing at the setting sun, he little imagines that within half an hour he will be dead. Everyone believes it to be a clear-cut case, but Scudder isn't convinced that the evidence or the victim are what they seem.