A Cold Case - Softcover

Twenty-seven years after the murders, on the eve of Rosenzweig's retirement as chief of investigations, he reopened the case, determined not to leave without catching the murderer of his friend. Philip Gourevitch, who last examined murder in the award-winning We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, is more interested in the personalities of killers and those who pursue them than the drama of murder itself. As a result, A Cold Case is short on tension, but it is an excellent character study. Gourevitch immerses us in the "white hoodlum milieu of another time and from a city which no longer really exists," and he conjures up the particular moral universe of each character--Rosenzweig; murder victim Richie Glennon, an ex-prizefighter who walked the fence between the good guys and the bad guys; Murray Richman, the Mob-defending lawyer from the Bronx who likes murder cases because there's "one less witness to worry about"; and Koehler himself, now elderly but still unremorseful. Gourevitch's skillful handling raises intriguing contradictions and questions, not least this one Koehler asks about himself: "Why would people still think good of this asshole?" Now, that's a story. --Lesley Reed

Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker, lives in New York City. His last book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, won the National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times Book Awards.