Ninety million dollars' worth of heroin is missing, and somehow, rookie cop Day Palmer is in the middle of it. It's the same drug shipment last seen in Moore's The French Connection, stopped on its way from Marseilles to the streets of New York. Only now someone has stolen it.
There's no shortage of suspects, starting with the police themselves. Palmer is the only straight cop in a crooked precinct. His partner, Pancho Navarro, is dead, shot in Palmer's own car. The homicide department is calling it a suicide, but everything about it looks like murder.
Palmer starts asking questions, which only makes things worse. He is mysteriously transferred to Narcotics, to the most corrupt squad in a severely twisted department. His new partners, Cronin and Shulman, act as though they'd be happy to see Palmer join his former partner in the cemetery overlooking the Queens Expressway.
Meanwhile, the trail to Navarro's killers leads through Navarro's wife, Christina, a sultry contact who understands the deadly games being played-perhaps a little too well. And it's not too long before Palmer realizes he's being set up. But when a lithe D.A. named Sally Friedlander forces Palmer to wear a wire, he gets his chance to frame the framers, or die trying.
The Set Up is based heavily on fact, but to protect the innocent, names and details have been changed. In a new introduction, master storyteller Robin Moore reveals just what happened, and why. Every bit as exciting as its predecessor, The Set Up is a classic of suspense literature.