Two cops come upon a man lying facedown on a New York street corner. It is before dawn and snowing. The body is wearing a jogging suit, sneakers, a stocking cap.
Rushed to the scene in a squad car, Chief of Detectives Bert P. Farber joins much of the headquarters brass standing over the body. The murdered man is Harry Chapman, the brilliant new police commissioner, an ex-cop turned politician, once Faber's radio car partner, and the man who married Farber's girl.
Chapman lived too far downtown to have jogged this far. How did he get here? Where is his gun? Who did this, and why? And who will inform his wife, Mary Alice, a rich man's daughter who Farber perhaps still loves and who now becomes part of the investigation?
Equally important, perhaps more important: who gets to succeed to the top job? By law the mayor must appoint a new PC within ten days. Standing with First Deputy Commissioner Priestly and Chief of the Department Sternhagen, Farber thinks: The new PC will be one of us three. If he can break the case quickly, he has a good chance. But he knows the others will block him any way they can.
Wall of Brass is the story of the way men, and women, react to the pressure of a murder investigation. As Farber discovers one shattering secret after another, marriages are threatened, careers are destroyed, old love affairs are brought to light. Wall of Brass is an inside novel that only Robert Daley, who has experienced headquarters intrigue firsthand, could have written. ( )