Totally Blue

When NYPD Detective Connor Finley awakens in the ER of a local hospital, feeling detached from his surroundings and far from reality, a nurse tells him, "You were bleeding out. We stopped that and transfused you. Then your heart stopped. We ran back in and zapped you. You're out of the woods now. It lodged near your heart. They're going to extract it. The bullet." As Connor slowly comes around he begins to remember what happened on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building in...
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When NYPD Detective Connor Finley awakens in the ER of a local hospital, feeling detached from his surroundings and far from reality, a nurse tells him, "You were bleeding out. We stopped that and transfused you. Then your heart stopped. We ran back in and zapped you. You're out of the woods now. It lodged near your heart. They're going to extract it. The bullet." As Connor slowly comes around he begins to remember what happened on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building in which he lives: the man, the gun, the sharp, hot punch to his chest, and the honking of a car horn that seemed to distract the shooter. He also remembers a woman, a nurse whose name tag read "Evangeline," who spoke to him and held his hand as he spiraled down into the netherworld between life and death. He is met with blank stares when he asks doctors and nurses about Evangeline. No one has ever heard of her.Six months later, as Connor returns to work and plunges into cases, he finds himself overwhelmed by recollections of his appalling childhood, defined by an alcoholic, abusive father and a pathetically weak mother, and the strategies he used to survive in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood. Reminding himself that nothing should deter him from his attempts to work his cases, Connor struggles to dismiss those troubling memories. At one point, a former partner, comments on Connor's single-mindedness, saying, "Finley, you were born for the job. You have perfect cop instincts, but that's it. You don't know how to be a partner. Damn it, you don't act like a human being." Connor thinks, "She's right. My defining characteristic--all there is to me--is that I'm a cop through and through, or as Lieutenant King said, I'm 'totally blue.'" During the course of Totally Blue, Connor and his newest partner, Nick Grosso, attempt to solve three cases: the bathtub drowning of Ronald Langford, a scheming attorney with a secret life; the bludgeoning deaths of Cathy and Margaret Finch, aged thirteen and ten, and the apparent suicide of their mother, Jocelyn Finch; and the shooting deaths of a man and woman in the parking garage of a building. Even though Connor is instructed by Lieutenant King to steer clear of the investigation into his own shooting, he unofficially digs for information related to that case. One evening, as Connor unlocks the door to his apartment, he is confronted by a man in the hallway who takes shots at him. Connor returns fire. Neither one is hit. The man escapes. Connor eventually begins to understand that this second attempt on his life is related to the first one and that both attacks are connected and that they tie into the double murder in the parking garage. Later on, he learns the identify of Evangeline and her association with the first attempt on his life. In the midst of Connor's efforts to close cases he finds that he is unable to push out of his mind scenes from an agonizing pivotal episode from his troubled past. Despite the psychic pain caused by that recollection, it provides a heretofore missing clue that helps to explain to Connor why he is who he is and what steps he has to take to live a more complete life.