A gripping account of an extraordinary international narcotics case as it unfolds on the streets of New York City, The French Connection is an absorbing and sometimes frightening documentary of the world's most successful narcotics investigation. A best-seller and the basis of the classic film of the same title, The French Connection remains one of the finest and most fascinating chronicles of police work ever written.
When New York City detectives Eddie "Popeye" Egan and his partner Sonny Grosso routinely tail the nephew of a fugitive mob boss, after observing some wild spending at the Copacabana, they quickly realize they're on to something big - an impending delivery of narcotics. The mobster's incongruous connections are with several distinguished Frenchmen, including the director of the world's largest heroin network and a star of French television. For many suspense-filled months, through opulent Manhattan nightclubs, dark tenements in Brooklyn and the Bronx, tree-lined streets of the genteel Upper East Side, and in Paris, Marseilles, and Palermo, the duel is on - the prize 112 pounds of pure heroin. Over three hundred investigators from local, state, federal, and international agencies are ultimately involved in the hours of weary surveillance, the skilled intuition, the luck - both good and bad - and the danger.