Thursday, October 1, 2026
Kevin Wade’s fictional detective, Jeep Mullane, is back on the case.
Wade, a Locust Valley resident and a longtime television writer, has written “One Good Eye,” set to be released on Aug. 11, the second installment in his North Shore mystery series, following his Edgar Award-nominated debut novel, “Johnny Careless.”
Like its predecessor, the novel uses familiar Long Island landmarks and communities as the backdrop for a crime story rooted in the area’s distinctive mix of wealth, history and local culture.
The 72-year old Wade, who spent 14 years as the showrunner and executive producer of the CBS series “Blue Bloods,” said he envisioned Mullane, a private investigator, as a recurring character similar to those found in some of the crime fiction that inspired him.
“When I approached this in the beginning, what I had in mind was Robert B. Parker’s ‘Spenser’ books,” Wade said. “Certainly John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee, the early books of Dennis Lehane in Boston, which paired two male and female private eyes, and they all became series.”
With readers embracing “Johnny Careless,” Wade now has the opportunity to continue Mullane’s story. The new novel opens when he is called to the Centre Island mansion of Jenny, a childhood friend from Bayville and a former classmate of Mullane’s at Locust Valley High School, by her driver. She has been attacked in her home, but refuses his help, forcing Mullane to unravel the mystery despite having an unwilling client.
The story moves between the present-day investigation and the pair’s teenage years.
“We then go back to when they met when they were 15,” Wade explained. “She lived down the street. She was an introverted, slightly wild child, very compelling, magnetic young woman.”
After Jenny loses an eye in a car accident, she reinvents herself, eventually becoming a wealthy lifestyle entrepreneur. But secrets from earlier in her life return in the form of blackmail, drawing Mullane into an increasingly dangerous investigation.
The North Shore itself is one of the novel’s central characters. Readers familiar with the area will recognize fictionalized versions of local landmarks along with real businesses. Buckram Stables restaurant, in Locust Valley, is known as the Beagle’s Nest in the novel, and Glen Cove restaurant La Ginestra serves as a setting for several scenes. “There’s a ton of Easter eggs if you live around here,” Wade noted.
Writing about places he knows, he said, helps him evoke the area’s unique character. “It’s all about trying to capture the different tribes, clans, classes that make up the North Shore, and have since millionaires came out 100 years ago and started building these vast monuments to themselves,” he said.
The longtime screenwriter said his years of churning out police dramas also prepared him to write crime fiction, though novels present different creative challenges than television.
“I’ve been writing professionally for, like, 46 years, and I was always writing entertainment,” Wade said. “Everything I ever did was for entertainment.”
Unlike television, where actors, directors and production crews bring a script to life, writing a novel requires the author to create every aspect of the story alone.
“I’m the director. I’m the cinematographer. I’m locations, wardrobe, hair, makeup, I mean everything,” he said. “I was the puppet master. Everybody was going to do what I said and look the way I wanted them to.”
Drawing on decades of conversations with retired detectives also helped ground the novel’s investigative details.
Writing novels, Wade said, has become an unexpected second act in a career that has included theater, film and television. For aspiring writers, his advice is straightforward.
“Find something that you want to write about that entertains you,” Wade said. “Write the whole thing. Don’t tell it up from a bar stool. Don’t give your friends five pages or 50. Write an entire draft of something. Write it again.
“Most importantly,” he concluded, “try to finish it.”
