My Father's Gun: One Family, Three Badges, 100 Years in the Nypd Book

In this powerful memoir about three generations of New York City policemen, Brian McDonald chronicles a hundred years of dedication and disillusion, heroism and tragedy behind the blue wall of silence that separates a cop from the rest of the world.

His grandfather, Thomas Skelly, entered the department in 1893, when the NYPD was little more than a brutal gang of organized enforcers, and Tammany Hall a corrupt political machine that could make or break an honest cop's career. His father Frank's career would span World War II through the sixties, taking him from street cop to squad commander of the 41st Precinct. Better known as "Fort Apache," it was a place from which few cops emerged whole. His brother Frank McDonald, Jr. went on to become a decorated officer, waging an undercover war on drugs and crime that would ironically lead, in 1987, to the most agonizing choice a good cop can make.

From the birth of the modern police department through Vietnam, from turn-of-the-century Brooklyn to the South Bronx in the seventies to the bedroom communities of upstate New York where cops fled to keep their families safe, My Father's Gun combines an intimate family story with turbulent social history. It is a rare inside look at the life and times of cops-told by one of their own.

"My Father's Gun is a wonderful, wonderful book. It is a unique look at an Irish family's hundred years with the police department. It is unflinching, joyous, sad, angry-and full of love." -- Peter Maas, author of Underboss and Serpico

"With My Father's Gun, Brian Mcdonald has written a cop book unlike any other, one that explores police life on the home-front as well as the front lines. As Brian McDonald traverses three generations of his own family's history in the New York Police Department, he gives readers an unprecedented and indelible portrait of pride and heartache, volcanic rage and pensive solitude-the whole range of human emotion that is usually hidden by the "thin blue line." My Father's Gun is as compulsively readable as the best crime books, but it plunges immeasurably deeper than they do into the soul."
--Samuel G. Freedman, author of The Inheritance and Small Victories

"An absorbing, extraordinarily well-written, moving, exciting and sometimes funny history of generations of New York City policemen. It allows us to see cops in a new light, one that helps us to understand and admire them."
--Stuart Woods, author of Orchid Beach and Worst Fears Realized

"My Father's Gun is a must read for every cop family. As a writer I applaud Brian McDonald's fascinating and beautifully written tapestry of experience and history. As a 20 year NYPD vet I welcome this incredibly heart-felt and intelligent peek behind the blue curtain. It turns the white-hot light on the inner lives of cops: from back alleys, to precinct back rooms, to their own bedrooms and the people they love and hurt the most."
-- Ed Dee, author of 14 Peck Slip and Nightbird