New York, August 1896. A “hot wave” has settled on the city with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses felled by the heat. Anti-immigrant sentiment has turned virulent; politically ambitious Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department; the yellow press is ready to pounce on the peccadilloes of the city’s social elite. When the body of Town Topics publisher William d’Alton Mann is found at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, any number of his ink-spattered victims may have a motive. Otto "Rafe" Raphael, one of the first Jewish officers in the heavily Irish N.Y.P.D., finds as many enemies within the department as outside it as he tries to solve the case. -- Adapted from book jacket.