Detective

In 1968, 1 percent of the New York City Police Department was female. When Kathy Burke joined the NYPD's ranks in June of that year she was one of only ten women in a class of 950 recruits. But the determined Burke had no doubt that she was born to be a cop, and in her twenty-three-year career she rose to be the most highly decorated female detective in the NYPD's history. Detective is her story. By turns caustic, funny, and matter-of-fact, Burke describes what it was like for a young woman to be surrounded by often hostile male officers and the uphill battle she fought to prove herself and earn their respect. But earn it she did. From her beginnings as an undercover cop making drug buys on New York's most dangerous streets to posing as Mrs. Patz to capture extortionists in the Etan Patz case to investigating the Mafia, Burke worked in some of the NYPD's most elite units on its most high-profile cases, eventually rising to the rank of detective first grade, the very highest in the detective bureau. Burke vividly portrays every aspect of a cop's experience, taking readers from the discos where she flirted with drug dealers to the halls of Congress, where she testified about drugs and corruption with a paper bag over her head (to protect her undercover persona), to a deserted street in Queens where a tragic shooting would forever change her career and her life. Burke is brutally honest in her criticism of NYPD leadership and corruption within the department, in her accounts of the physical and emotional toll taken by the job that she loved, and in her descriptions of the sacrifices -- sometimes even the greatest sacrifice of all -- that cops must make. Detective is a revelatory and inspirational story of life lived without apology, of stubborn courage, and of a woman who triumphed over doubts, recrimination, and personal tragedy to truly become one of New York's Finest.