'Blue Bloods' showrunner Kevin Wade is back with crime novel 'One Good Eye'

"Blue Bloods" showrunner and Long Islander Kevin Wade is back with the second installment of his detective series featuring Bayville Police Chief Jeep Mullane. If there were any doubt about Jeep's hometown loyalties, he blasts them off the map in a mini-manifesto delivered midway through the new novel, "One Good Eye" (Celadon, $28.99) and worth quoting at length if not getting tattooed on some accommodating body part:

"Long Island is my home; historically, legally, patriotically, culturally, spiritually. I hope they bury me there, with a bacon-egg-cheese-salt-pepper-ketchup breakfast sandwich for the journey to the other side. Maybe suited up in baggy old cargo shorts, a Billy Joel tour T-shirt and wraparound Maui Jim shades. Better yet, push me into the Sound, laid out on an old skiff ablaze in a funeral pyre of 1960s torn-down-ranch-home timber and back issues of Newsday, like some Nassau County Viking."

Wade will be talking about the book with comedian Dan Wilbur at Gold Coast Forum in Oyster Bay on Aug. 20, but first Wade spoke to Newsday via Zoom.

How did you decide to set your series on Long Island?

Honest answer: because I knew the area really well. I've lived on the North Shore since 2001. And I've always loved the kind of detective novel that uses the area it's set in as a kind of third character. Dennis Lehane's Boston, Carl Hiassen's Florida, etc. That seemed like a fun way to do it, and other than Nelson DeMille's "The Gold Coast" and of course, the best North Shore crime novel of all time, "The Great Gatsby," the Long Island setting had not been done.

What aspects of Long Island life are especially useful to you as a novelist?

The fact that you can drive east on Northern Boulevard and make a left into some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and make a right into a totally different culture. On one side are century-old country clubs with exclusive memberships and rules of order and on the other you've got little houses on a fifth of an acre, Hicksville, AutoZone, one fast food joint after another. There is a ruling class and a service class, and that creates the tensions that drive both novels.

How does that work in "One Good Eye?"

Jenny Racine, the victim in the story, was raised by a single mom and didn't have much growing up, even less when she had her eye put out in a car accident at 16. She goes from being just a regular girl in the local high school to being the person that everybody turns and looks at when she walks into a room because she wears a patch over her eye. She develops a kind of mystical ambition to overcome that, eventually becoming an ultrasuccessful perfume entrepreneur and lifestyle influencer and making a lot, lot of money.

But there's a choice that she made back at the time of the accident that now comes back to haunt her. She told a lie to protect someone — but there are people out there who know the truth.

And it happens to be somebody on the other side of the economic divide, somebody who wants some of what she has, and next thing you know there's a blackmail scheme and a home invasion. As we learn in both "Johnny Careless" and "One Good Eye," one of Jeep's assets as a detective is that he is able to move in both worlds.

In both books I use the trick of telling the story both in the present and the past, so I'm able to track Jeep's relationship to the victims from origin story to present day. Jeep's deep affection for them, and his sharp eye for the customs and codes of their orbits, raises both the emotional stakes and his chances for figuring out who the actual bad guys are.

Did working on "Blue Bloods" shape the way you write about crime and law enforcement?

Definitely. Everything I'd written before would sort of fall into the category of romantic comedy, the most successful being the movies "Working Girl" and "Maid in Manhattan." With "Blue Bloods," crimes were the story engine. Who did it, what did they do, why, how do you catch them, and what does it cost you? What did you give up to put the guy behind bars? As the show went on for 14 years, that became the question I was most interested in. What is the effect on the cop?

For Jeep, the way it plays out is that because he's a lifelong local, he's often faced with family or old friends who are making bad choices. He still feels a connection to them, so to do the right thing costs him something personally.

Can we expect another installment?

It's entirely possible, but right now I'm taking my first break from writing in 45 years. I'm enjoying my kayak, and my friends' boats, and I've also been trying to learn golf, but I may have missed my moment on that one.