In "Blue Blood," his much anticipated memoir of life as an NYPD detective, Edward Conlon tells this joke. CIA agents, FBI agents and Bronx NYPD detectives gather in the woods and are told to hunt down a rabbit. The first two groups nab their quarry in minutes, but after two hours the Bronx guys have not returned. When they finally do, they have subdued a giant bear, who is saying: "OK, OK, I'm a rabbit." At its best, Conlon's book is full of such revealing anecdotes: they are honest, funny, sometimes awful and always complex. "Blue Blood" is easily one of the most revealing looks ever at life "on the job." Conlon confronts urban squalor as well as absurd bureaucratic nitpicking within the department itself. "Blue Blood" is also timely. Conlon outlines the dangers of "vertical patrols" - that is, patrolling high rise apartment projects from lobby to roof. Earlier this year there was a controversial police shooting in Brooklyn, New York, following just such a vertical patrol. To flesh out this book (which, it must be said, is too long) Conlon looks not only to New York history and St. Augustine, but also his own Irish family's history in New York. His grandfather was an infamously corrupt police officer, while Conlon's Dad was an upwardly mobile FBI agent. Conlon himself went to Harvard, and it shows. Some of the writing in Blue Blood is gorgeous. It is not surprising, then, that Conlon's Dad was shocked, even disappointed, when his son decided to, well, enter the family business. Such conflicting emotions make "Blue Blood" often as poignant as it is dramatic. ($26.95 / 512 pages / Riverhead)