On Jan. 6, 1997, the Manhattan District Attorney's chief of investigations, Andy Rosenzweig, happened to be reminded of a friend who had been murdered nearly 27 years earlier. New Yorker staffer Philip Gourevitch's book A Cold Case describes Rosenzweig's belated pursuit of his friend's fugitive killer, a minor tough named Frank Koehler. Not quite a non-fiction police procedural, A Cold Case is primarily concerned with the passage of time, and whether a crime long forgotten by the public still deserves to be punished. Gourevitch offers a sketch of Koehler's criminal career, spanning 50 years but consisting only of three documented violent outbursts and long stretches of idleness, and he charts Rosenzweig's rise from beat cop in a corrupt precinct to bigwig detective. The book is short—about the length of three substantial magazine articles strung together—and contains little in the way of heart-stopping action. There are police-involved shootings and foot chases, but they're related dryly, by people who have long gotten over the thrills of those moments, and they have little to do with the central tale. What the anecdotes amount to is a crinkled reminiscence of a fading time, when mob influence was more overt and the NYPD was as likely to be on the take as on the job. A Cold Case is so digressive that it could easily have been two or three times as long, had Gourevitch chosen to explore the lives and times of all the characters he meets as expansively as he explores Koehler and Rosenzweig. But the reporter keeps his piece tight for a reason. The milieu is not the story, nor are the attempts to close the "cold case" of the title. The story is the murder itself, a barroom disagreement that the cranky Koehler could not let go, and the way misdeeds and justice often depend on similar strings of coincidence. Crime in A Cold Case is something that just occurs, like a sudden fall or a lightning strike, its meaning proportionate to the extent that the pain it causes lingers in the memory.