Scudder returns in 'A Drop of the Hard Stuff'

Matthew Scudder, an aging private detective and recovering alcoholic, is sitting in a Hell’s Kitchen saloon with his old pal Mick Ballou, a retired mobster who once carried the heads of his victims in a bowling-ball bag. As they chat, the subject of “High-Low” Jack Ellery comes up. The name transports Scudder (and the reader) back to the 1980s, before much of Manhattan was gentrified, to a time when the crime rate soared and sin seemed to lurk around every corner.

Scudder, the hero of 16 previous Block novels, had gone to grammar school with Ellery but he rarely saw him afterward — just once in a police lineup and another time when they ran into each other at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.