Gabriel Cohen

Red Hook was nominated for the Edgar award for Best First Novel.
 
It's not the dead body--Jack Leightner has seen hundreds of bodies in his tour with the NYPD's Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force. It's not the dank setting--the narrow banks along the Gowanus Canal. So why does the sight of a fatally stabbed young man make the detective almost faint in the tangled weeds? Jack doesn't understand why he becomes obsessed with this low-priority case, why he allows it to jeopardize his career and even his life. Especially since the investigation draws him exactly where he doesn't want to go:  into the heart of Red Hook. The neighborhood is Leightner's bad dream, the scene of his troubled childhood and a terrible secret.

In the chill of winter a homemade coffin drifts ashore in Red Hook, containing the body of a boy with the lettersG.I. written on his forehead. Detective Jack Leightner of the Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force is assigned to help a local detective with the case, but the man proves strangely uninterested. The investigation keeps interfering with Jack's attempts to propose to his girlfriend, as his pursuit of the killer takes him on a whirlwind tour of hidden parts of New York harbor, from the secret world of Governor's Island to the graving docks of the old Brooklyn Navy Yard.
 
This sequel to Red Hook is even richer in atmosphere, action, and mysteries of the human heart.

"If we took it all personally," Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner tells his rookie NYPD partner, "there's no way we could do the job." Very soon, though, that notion gets shot to hell, as the deeply principled cop hears about the murder of an old Russian friend on Neptune Avenue---and then is disturbed to find himself increasingly drawn to the man's stunning widow, Eugenia. She informs Jack of her husband's troubles with Semyon Balakutis, a local nightclub operator and extortionist. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger in central Brooklyn is killing young women and posing them as suicides. 
 
From the Russian emigré community of Brighton Beach to the racially charged neighborhood of Crown Heights, from the crimes of World War II to the harshness of his own father, Jack's latest cases plunge him deep into the roots of why men act in anger---and into the eternal mystery of love.
 

Brooklyn South Homicide detective Jack Leightner is at home enjoying a quiet day off when a stranger appears at his door and completely overturns his understanding of his own past. The next day, what looks like a mundane killing in a Brooklyn deli takes a bizarre turn when a crew of Homeland Security agents suddenly show up wearing anti-radiation gear. Soon Jack is embroiled in two dangerous and far-reaching investigations: a hunt for the  deli killer, and a quest back into his own family's history in the 1960s on the Mafia-dominated waterfront of Red Hook.

"A confirmed skeptic, writer Gabriel Cohen never thought he'd find himself embracing Buddhism. But when his marriage fell apart, he discovered that its insights were surprisingly relevant and useful; they offered him a positive path through anger, resentment, loss, and grief. Now, in the first book to focus on Buddhism and divorce, he provides a practical, down-to-earth guide to surviving the pain of a romantic breakup. A compulsively readable story of crisis and renewal, Storms Can't Hurt the Sky will appeal to those of any faith who are looking to recover from their own losses."

One block. Four neighbors. One very loud problem.
 
Black and white, young and old, male and female, they live in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill, sharing a courtyard in relative harmony. It's what a former mayor liked to call "the urban mosaic." There's Carol Fasone, a secretary enjoying her new marriage to a Bosnian immigrant. There's Mitchell Brett, a Wall Streeter transplanted from Manhattan's Upper East Side, trying to get his wife pregnant. There's Grace Howard, hoping for a promotion in her corporate job, surprised to find herself beginning a romance with a member of the board. And then there's teenage Jamel Wilson, who buys a big sound system to impress his friends from the projects around the corner, blasts gangster rap into the backyard gardens, and—over the course of one hot summer—pushes the block's friendships and alliances past the breaking point.