The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder takes us back to the very beginning, long before the books began, and gives us our first glimpse of Scudder's childhood, his family tragedies, his upbringing--and a powerful new perspective on how he first got drawn to police work and how, eventually, painfully, he left it. Even longtime readers who think they know Scudder's story will be startled by how much they don't know and powerfully moved as the aging Scudder reflects on his life from the vantage point of a man drawing ever nearer to the end"--