Editor’s note: Subtitles for this story are lines from the book and the back cover

Michael Riley retired in 1995 after 25 years as a Philadelphia police officer and an undercover detective in the Narcotics Special Operations Division.

He has wrapped his city street experiences around the characters and plotlines of his new novel, “The Long Last Out,” a story about a veteran and a rookie cop who become best friends until one has life-changing moments while investigating a case that mystifies the entire world.

In the cold hours of darkness on the last out shift, anything can happen.

The graduate of Philly’s North Catholic High School who now lives in Jim Thorpe with Denise, his wife of 37 years, investigated crime in the ’80s and ’90s with a lot of “shoe leather” and phone calls instead of the technology used in police work today. Yet that fact contributed to the love Riley had for his job that began with unpredictability every single day.

“You never knew what to expect,” he said. “We had a saying that our badge is a ticket to the greatest show on earth.”

The unexpected happened to Riley one day when Bob Clements, his best friend since he was 3 years old, became his undercover partner just by chance. Together they infiltrated urban habitats where territorial drug wars were commonly fought by rival gangs. Unbeknown to Riley at the time, he was collecting memories for his first novel.

“Police work can be pretty frightening,” he said, “and back then I didn’t wear a bulletproof vest for the first 12 years of my career.”

Litter and trash speckled the cinder field of the city playground.

Riley’s playgrounds were the projects in South Philadelphia where he had spent many days and nights as an undercover detective flushing out noted drug dealers.

“I grew a beard and wore scraggly clothes to look like I was just another guy living on the streets,” he said.

“We paid informants as much as $500 to tell us where we could find the dealers. The informants were drug users for the most part and they put their lives on the line because they needed money for food, shelter and, of course, their fixes.”

They assigned me to a wagon with probably the best cop in the department.

These are the words of Nick Avner, Riley’s main character, who is a recruit fresh out of the police academy. The novel traces Nick’s quick maturation as a cop that’s guided by Tommy “Tabs” Tabozzi, a 15-year veteran of the force.

“Just like you’d see on TV, patrolling the city in what we call our wagon is a partnership. We have to rely on each other to stay alive,” Riley said.

Both Nick and Tommy have compelling back stories. Nick still feels the loss of his father who was killed 12 years ago in a construction accident and Tabozzi is still haunted by the death of his 15-year-old son.

The story builds intrigue when Tabozzi disappears without a trace and Nick becomes a detective in charge of finding out what had happened to his friend.

His body jolted with a sudden spasm from a sharp burning pain …

Writing a police novel that is colored with vivid details was a routine duty for Michael Riley. Growing up in Philly, he showed no particular talent for the writing craft, but once he answered Mayor Frank Rizzo’s call for a substantial increase in the numbers of city police officers, he soon learned how to write investigative reports.

“During and after every criminal investigation I wrote narratives about what went down to the exact detail,” he explained. “These reports were case files for the district attorney’s office for prosecuting those we arrested,” he explained.

In Chapter 32 of “The Long Last Out,” Riley describes in graphic detail the shooting of officer Lopez during a stakeout. His character’s bloody leg wounds and a “jagged hole on the left side of his face” display the reality of the horrid dangers that city cops faced every time they answered their radio calls.

“Although my novel is fiction,” said Riley, “the events in the plot are based upon real experiences. The characters’ personalities and behaviors are created from real people I’ve known while working in the law enforcement field. I’d say it’s about 95 percent is truth.”

The detectives returned to Philly and they were exhausted from the long trip.

This sentence begins Chapter 44 after Nick’s new partner, Chuck, secretly records a psychologist’s diagnosis of an unknown individual who was implicated in criminal behavior.

The words also describe Michael Riley’s long and arduous task of integrating his memories as a Philadelphia cop into the sequence of his book’s storyline. He worked four to five hours on most every night for 18 months crafting his novel.

“It was originally 120,000 words,” he said. “I needed editing help to cut back the story and to rearrange the order of some of the events.”

Riley’s “long trip” to the finish line of his book was rewarding in two special ways.

“My son had earned a college scholarship in writing, but of all things, he became a master welder. When I was the one who wrote a book, the irony was a special moment between us,” he said with a laugh.

His other special moment was holding the actual book in his hands for the first time.

“It was just words on a computer screen until I could hold the physical thing,” he said. “Only then did it feel real.”

Michael Riley has written a police mystery that is as real as it gets right down to the final chapter. “The Long Last Out” is available on Liberty Hill Publishing Bookstore, Amazon Books, and Barnes & Noble in both paperback and e-book editions. He is currently adapting his novel into a motion picture screen play.

Riley has pledged the first three months’ proceeds from the sales of his book to “Families Behind the Badge,” a national organization with a local chapter in Jim Thorpe that gives memorial medals to the families of police officers who have fallen in the line of duty.