Knock-Off

Lt. Joe Dante #3

by Christopher Newman

For Detective Joe Dante, a grisly killing is the first shocker in the last case any cop wants...

MILLIONAIRE ART COLLECTOR OSCAR WEMBLEY is hacked to death with a kitchen knife, his priceless paintings slashed to bits, his blood used to paint vicious epithets on the walls of his Greenwich Village townhouse...

FAT-CAT NEUROSURGEON GEORGE SCULLY is slapped with a killer malpractice suit that could ruin his practice, destroy his marriage to a WASP princess, and expose his cozy setup with shapely blond cokehead Fiona Hassey...

BRILLIANT DETECTIVE JOE DANTE, formerly of Midtown South, now assigned to the Sixth Precinct, is tracking down the maniac who probably killed Wembley when an even more bizarre and baffling murder forces him to question everything and everyone he knows...

Genres: Fiction

282 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 1989

About the author

Born in San Francisco, California in 1952, Christopher Newman was educated in Bay Area Catholic schools, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Birmingham University, England. He travelled overland from Europe across the Asian subcontinent to Singapore alone in his late teens. Before he was 21 he'd worked for a year aboard a tanker plying trade between the Persian Gulf and ports around the Pacific rim. He wrote the first draft of his third published novel, Manana Man, while in residence in Cali, Colombia his senior year in college. At 27, he moved to New York City, working as a trim carpenter for five years in Manhattan before publishing his first Joe Dante novel, Midtown South, in 1985. When that title met with considerable commercial success, his publisher convinced him to turn his protagonist into a series character. Eight more Joe Dante novels followed, all making various national best seller lists. Midtown North, published in 1991, was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Chains of Command, left unfinished at the time of best-selling author William Caunitz death in 1998, was completed by Mr. Newman at the estate's request. It was named a 1999 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Mr. Newman left New York in 2002 and currently resides in Lexington, Kentucky.