A NEW Edition of the Highly Acclaimed 

Debut Novel in the Jack Devlin "ONE" SERIES.

This novel was first published in 1992. I don’t remember exactly when I began writing it. I do remember the two events that inspired the story. The first event occurred in 1976 when I visited an after-hours club in downtown Manhattan. The second event came in 1979. A six-year-old boy named Etan Patz disappeared on a spring morning in New York’s SoHo district, igniting the worst fears of parents around the country. It happened during a two-block walk to his school bus stop. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind those two events brewed for years. What if someone you loved vanished? What would you do to find them? And what if it turned out that the mysterious, hidden world of after-hours clubs had something to do with the disappearance? 

At some point in the late eighties, those questions became the inspiration for my first novel. I hardly remember writing it. My sense is that it came out in a sudden rush. And selling it to a publisher happened quite fast. I landed an agent, George Wieser, very quickly. And as I recall, George sold it to Crown within a few weeks.

Thank you, George. I do remember spending a very long time editing the book under the guidance of Peter St. John Ginna. He was patient with me. He made it a much better book. I still appreciate his efforts. 

Speaking of patience, in the original author’s note I thanked my wife Ellen for her patience. A good deal of the research for And Justice for One started at four in the morning after legal bars closed. All these years later Ellen is still patient with me, but more importantly, she still loves me, and I her. 

The others I thanked in the first edition were “the people who made it possible for me to enter the world of after-hours clubs”.

One of them was a friend named Tommy Burns. When I asked Tommy how I should acknowledge him in the first edition, he said “Use T.B., ‘Bartender to the Stars.’” Tommy rarely took anything very seriously.

Obviously, all the after-hours clubs described in this book no longer exist. But all of them except for one, which is a composite of three clubs, existed very much as described. It was a wild time in NYC. A time before cell phones and the internet and Uber. A time long gone. 

So, what prompted me to re-publish And Justice for One? Since its publication in 1992, I have persisted in writing crime thrillers, despite a ten-year break after the first five. All of those novels are out of print, but readers often ask me how they can get them. This is an attempt to make that easier. It has also provided me with the opportunity to polish the book. Nothing substantive, but lots of nips and tucks. This new edition is still what I consider a raw, rather impetuous novel from an unformed writer just starting out. Maybe that’s the best kind. Hope you enjoy it.