On a winter day in Harlem, NY, Catholic priest Frank Redmond is found dead, crushed by a fall from a rooftop a few blocks away from his church. When his body is brought to the city morgue for an autopsy, his lifelong friend Gabe Driscoll, Chief of Internal Affairs for the NYPD, attends, and thinks back to the days when they won the NY Catholic High Schools Championship in swimming three decades earlier.

Despite a complete lack of evidence to the contrary, Driscoll thinks it a case of murder, refusing to believe that his friend had any reason for suicide. The eagerness of his police brethren as well as the church diocese to rule it one merely exacerbates the Chief's determination to prove them wrong, even if it means stepping beyond the boundaries of his high position on the police force and putting that position at risk. He goes against orthodoxy in more ways than one by so ardently pursuing an investigation with the help of third swim team member Andrew Troy, now a prize-winning journalist. But finding out who may have pushed the dead priest is not something that's going to be left to anyone's assumption.

He and Troy combine their memories and different areas of expertise in revisiting and digging up events and relationships in their friend's life in an attempt to explain his death. In one seminal moment, we learn that Redmond couldn't find a way to express his love for a woman, explaining, perhaps, the real motivation behind his turn to the church and to world travel. He found sworn celibacy to be the mechanism to cope with feelings of disappointment in himself. Troy, in fact, met up with Redmond in Vietnam and Africa where the priest was, first, a Marine Corps chaplain and later a missionary living in a hut on the Zembezi River.

As for Roxie, the woman in Redmond's life when he took up the vestments, she wound up marrying the fourth member of the swim team, the bow legged diver Earl Finley, now a public prosecutor. But it may have been more a way to remain close to Redmond than because of deep love for Earl. Gangsters, drug dealers, even the Mafia also roll into the investigative picture, with guilt and purgation hanging in the balance.

Author Daley ("Prince of the City"), himself a former Deputy New York Police Commissioner, finds an original way to explore crime and crises of faith. He traces past and present in alternating chapters, to keep events in the dead priest's life leading up to his death as vivid as the current day investigation. The technique works as a means of orientation in so ambitious a tackling of the life evolution of four men. At times, the detail presented tests the tension level of the story and, therefore, its pacing, but this is good work with fascinating rewards, despite that. Daley's depth of character description and credible tracing of destinies goes deeply through generations to solve a singular mystery.