Excerpt from Proving Ground by Peter Blauner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You telling me to back off?"

"Just saying. You have options."

So he's heard about Erik Heinz.

"You want me off, do whatever you have to do," she says. "But I'm not going willingly."

He looks her up and down. Other girls may have wanted to be ballerinas or princesses, but Lourdes never thought about being anything other than a cop. Spent her nights watching Kojak reruns and reading Dorothy Uhnak novels while Papi was starting his bid upstate and Mami was out getting high. And now that she's finally made it to a detective squad, she's not looking back. Other people got into the job for the benefits or because they couldn't think of anything else to do. But Lourdes always knew she had the calling. While other girls she grew up with at the projects were getting pregnant too young and soft-minded with reality shows and self-pity, she was sharpening up like a Westinghouse scholar. Getting all sagacious and streetwise about human behavior. Even Erik Heinz couldn't quite kill her feeling for the work. After eleven years on the job, the girl loves having her own desk and coffee mug with the NYPD emblem, loves the dark science forensics and data-bank searches, loves the interrogation head games, and yes, even sometimes loves working with men instead of women—appreciating the simplicity of dealing with a bunch of coarse, hairy-knuckled guys who don't talk shit all day about their weight and how no one really appreciates them.

"Hey, detectives." Bowman is waving them over, a tech from Crime Scene with him holding up a wallet. "Know who this is?"

The vic has been rolled. An older guy, maybe mid-sixties, with a halo of wizard-white hair spilling out around his head and a kind of exhausted middle-class nobility to his leonine features. He wears a scruffy beard and the slightly perplexed expression of a man interrupted while making his morning coffee.

"That's David Dresden." Sullivan goes still.

"The lawyer?" Lourdes asks.

"Try the lawyer every cop in the city hates," the captain says.

Big mouth on the evening news, press conferences on courthouse steps, always carrying on about police brutality and racial injustice. Lourdes heard him referred to as "the white Al Sharpton" and worse long before she even became a cop. Despised not only for keeping criminals out of prison but for causing epic traffic jams with his protest marches.

"Scumbag." The captain breathes out a cold vapor. "I don't want to say 'what goes around comes around,' but…"

"Then don't." Sullivan turns away, broad shoulders hunched.

"Wasn't he just in the news, defending some raghead who wanted to blow up a bridge?" the captain asks, not taking the hint.

"Suing the FBI." Sullivan looks back over his shoulder, setting his teeth. "For a client who claims he was tortured. Slight difference." He eyes Lourdes. "Sure you still want in?"

"I come a long way to get back to the dance, daddy." She sticks her chest out. "Don't send me home early."

"Suit yourself." Sullivan takes out his notepad and ambles back to the body. "Just don't count on meeting any princes at the ball."

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