The first time Frank Koehler shot someone dead was in 1945, when he was only 16. In and out of prison several times for this and other crimes, he managed to keep his nose fairly clean through the 1960s. But in February 1970, he shot two men dead. There was a witness, a third man Koehler wounded; but the killer disappeared and eventually the NYPD closed the case on the assumption that Koehler is dead. Nearing retirement in 1997, Andy Rosenzweig, chief of investigations for the Manhattan district attorney's office, decides to make one last effort either to catch Koehler or to find proof he's really dead, 27 years after the crime.

From a prize-winning author and, in Elmore Leonard's words, "a knockout writer," comes a masterfully written and gripping tale of a determined investigator who reopens an unresolved case of double homicide in New York nearly thirty years after the brutal event. Philip Gourevitch vividly evokes the almost vanished gangland of New York in the sixties, and carries us deep into the lives and minds, the passions and perplexities, of two extraordinary men who embody opposing but quintessentially American codes of being―the lawman Andy Rosenzweig and the outlaw Frankie Koehler. With A Cold Case, Gourevitch masterfully transforms a criminal investigation into a searching literary reckoning with the urges that drive one man to murder and another to hunt murderers.