With its shut-down mines, with its scarred and restive blue-collar descendants of Eastern European and Italian immigrants, Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, is in the midst of tough times. And no one has it tougher than its own police chief, Mario Balzic. Working harder and longer hours than he ever did in his long-ago rookie days, Balzic again pilots a black-and-white through the town's brooding streets. The recent death of his mother, whose warm presence is especially missed by his wife Ruth, doesn't make it easier. Balzic answers a call: a strange woman, Valery, mother of a young daughter named Coo, warns that her violent husband may exact a brutal form of revenge on a truck-driver with a shady past. She wants Balzic to head off the attack, but supplies few details. Balzic senses worse trouble ahead than suggested by Valery - and events prove Balzic's instincts apocalyptically correct. Meanwhile, at the local tavern, Balzic encounters Myushkin, a wild, deceptively eccentric Russian-American writer, with nine novels to his credit, no visible means of support, and an alarming facility with a .22 revolver. It's Myushkin who becomes Balzic's spiritual guide through the case - and a peculiarly American, distinctly personal brand of hell.

It's been months since Mario Balzic retired, and the position of Rocksburg's police chief has been open ever since. To the dismay of Detective Sergeant Rugs Carlucci, Mayor Angelo Bellotti is holding his cards close to his chest. A career underachiever with some surprising inner strengths, Rugs isn't even sure of his own ambitions. Carlucci's aging, incessantly demanding mother is already complaining about her son's hefty overtime duty, unwilling to understand that without it he couldn't afford the care she needs. And Rugs knows the job itself would be more pain than prestige, with a department out of money and dirt-low on staff. Now Rugs faces a grisly, unexpected test of his suddenly elevated status. A woman has been found horribly raped and mortally battered.

Rumors of cutbacks during election time were hardly a novelty, especially in the wake of the Reagan-Bush trickle-down eighties. Already the Sanitation Department, the city's vehicle mechanics, its plumber, and two carpenters were history, replaced by private contractors. Nevertheless, Rocksburg hadn't had a big firing in years. When Balzic gets a summons from the mayor, the last thing on his mind is police layoffs. The chief finds himself forced to eliminate five officers, leaving him twenty-five members to police a city of fifteen thousand. As Mayor Kenny Strohn puts it, a city with a boarded-up Main Street and an empty treasury hardly has a choice. Yet Balzic - profane, arrogant, occasionally dangerous, and up until now, a survivor - is losing more than his policing capability. He's also losing his imagination. From somewhere inside his own department, a new and even more unexpected menace has surfaced. Witnesses report a small number of heavily armed, camouflaged commandos rappelling out of blue-and-white helicopters. Rocksburg may not have much left, but someone is willing to outfit and deploy a small private army to get it. They call it privatization. They say it works better than government. But Balzic's job is to protect his city. And Balzic's city is not for sale. It's all been happening under Balzic's chin, and he never saw it. The cop who never voted, who always pretended he was above power plays and politics, now has to perform the easiest and the hardest act of his career. Look down.

Police Chief Mario Balzic has got one hot Italian on his heels. Albert Castelucci wants to straighten some things out about his son's murder. It seems that the investigator Balzic appointed to Castelucci's case made such a mess no jury could convict the killer. Pushing Balzic into losing his temper may just provide the answers Castelucci needs.

K. C. Constantine has enthralled a generation of readers with the exploits of rust belt Pennsylvania police chief Mario Balzic and detective Rugs Carlucci. Now the author takes a bold step down the chain of command to join the rank and file of Rocksburg's finest—and invites you to ride the beat of three street-hardened cops at a crossroads.

SAVING ROOM FOR DESSERT

William Rayford rose from mall security guard to candidate for detective sergeant in the Rocksburg PD in just six years. Yet his rise can't change the fact that he's the only black man in the department, he still hasn't been promoted, and he can't persuade his wife to leave her voodoo-believing mother and live with him. His colleague Robert "Booboo" Canoza is always the first cop through the door when it comes to breaking up a barroom brawl, but he can't cope with old ladies who lock themselves out of their cars. And their fellow patrolman James Reseta returned from Vietnam with a chestful of ribbons, only to learn that what helped him survive combat won't work on the job...or in daily life.

Now working the same watch, each man harbors his own private dread of their patrol in the Flats, a part of the city hard by the Conemaugh River, where parking spaces on narrow streets turn minor arguments into blood feuds and man's best friend transforms lifelong neighbors into worst enemies. And in one part of the block, called the United Nations on its good days and Jerusalem on its bad ones, two of these patrolmen will step into an outburst of violence that can kill careers—and cops—before their time. SAVING ROOM FOR DESSERT is K. C. Constantine and Rocksburg at their most earthy, original, and engaging.

The best days of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, are behind it. The mills are closed, the mines shut down, and the townsfolk while the days away in the local bars and somehow manage to get along. Yet every once in a while something or someone strikes a spark that lifts everyone up and puts Rocksburg back on the map. Decades before, Bobby Blasco went north to pitch for the Boston Red Sox. Known as the Brushback Kid, he set records in every league he played - including most hit batmen. During spring training in 1959 he even threw square to the head of the great Ted Williams. Later a mysterious accident landed him a permanent place on the disabled list, and he came home to run an illegal gambling club in Rocksburg's Flats. Now Detective Sergeant Rugs Carlucci, the acting chief of the Rocksburg PD, is at Conemaugh General Hospital: Mom is having either a heart or an anxiety attack. While they're in the ER, Rugs gets the call. Someone has murdered the Brushback Kid. Running the plays in a major-league murder investigation - and trying to ensure his own domestic tranquility - Carlucci must find out why the pitching phenom went wrong. Interviews of a parade of Blasco's ex-wives and former friends show a man out of control, a man who took domestic abuse to its farthest limits and who made an enemy of virtually everyone who crossed his line of sight. Carlucci's question: Which of these, in an ironic fit of sportsman's logic, was enemy enough to take a Louisville Slugger to Blasco's head in a pitch-black, frozen alley?