People often assume that Batman takes care of all the crime in Gotham City. But he can't be everywhere, and so the members of the Gotham Police take care of daytime crime and crime involving unsuperpowered criminals. This, is their story.
When Detectives Driver and Fields are investigating an apartment looking for a missing girl for a tip they recieved from a snitch, they are surprised to find one of the occupants is Victor Fries, also known as Mr. Freeze. Freeze kills Charlie Driver with his Freeze Gun, turning him to ice, and freezes Marcus Fields' hands to his gun, but leaves him alive.
The Captain wants to call in Batman, but Marcus begs him not to. Charlie, his partner, called the Bat-Signal demoralizing to the Squad, since it was clear that Bat-man had a higher clearance rate for his cases than the cops did. It's a signal of their own failure to use it. He begs the Captain not to turn it on until sundown. Give the cops at the precinct that long. The Captain reluctantly agrees.
Everyone on the precinct fans out, looking for clues, wanting to solve this for Charlie. They know it's something big, but none of the leads seem to pan out. Until Marcus sees an invitation on his desk that brings back something Fries said to him, and he realizes what Mr. Freeze's target is: Comissioner Gordon's speech to the latest graduating class of cops... and knows he must bring in Batman, who takes out Freeze before he can put the chill on the entire building.
After that, the department must track down a firebug, and the suspect in the murder of a fifteen year old babysitter killed in the park as she walked home from a job watching children. Who could it have been? The homeless man she befriended and spoke to regularly? Some lowlife who only saw a vulnerable target, easy to attack? But when the cases suddenly merge, they discover how low a man can sink in his efforts to keep a secret...
Finally, Reneé Montoya is a good cop, formerly partner to Harvey Bullock and now partnered with Chris Allen, a black cop. Reneé is having difficulties in both her personal life and her professional life. For one, she's a lesbian, and her parents would condemn her to hell if they ever found out, and Marty Lipari, a suspect in a rape case, won the case and is now suing her. But when she finds pictures of her and her lover have been sent to the station house and her parents, she finds her stress levels rising. Luckily, her brother smooths things over with her parents, but the other cops, with the exception of her partner, needle her about her "leanings".
Then, her backup piece is stolen from her apartment, and she gets into an altercation with Marty Lipari, who has been taking pictures of her and her lover, and who threatens the safety of her lover. Later that night, Lipari is killed, which gets her into an IAD investigation. She is arrested, but before she can even go to jail, she is broken out of the bus and taken to the swank apartment of none other than Two-Face, who she met and worked with during the time when Gotham became No Man's Land. She was able to connect with Harvey Dent, the good, normal side of Two-Face, and he apparently fell in love with her. Two-Face, Harvey's insane alternate persona has as well, and orchestrated a campaign to remove her from everything she loves and values- her family, her job, her reputations, and even her lover, and then offers her a life with him in return. Who can protect her from this crazy criminal and will this experience finally bring her out of the closet for good?
I enjoyed this graphic novel very much, and found it to be wonderfully gritty and realistic... well, if you discount the supervillains. And supervillains do permeate the pages of the stories, as much as Batman does. Even the second story, about the Firebug, revolves around a costume used by a firebug villain, who sold it when he needed money. The costume becomes the catalyst for the new owner's need to stand out, and leads to the murder of the babysitter.
I found this reasonable for a title set in the most crime-ridden of all the DC Universe's cities (well until the introduction of Blüdhaven, anyway). Costumed criminals, both super-powered and gadget-powered, run rampant on the streets of Gotham, and even Batman can't account for them all. In a way, it reminded me a bit of the Savage Dragon comic, which is about a super-powered guy who also happens to be a cop, but in the way that the story is about solving crimes and characters who just happen to be cops.
And none of the characters here are superhuman in any way. They fight the crooks of Gotham not with gadgets or superpowers but simple human intelligence and deductive ability. There's something almost noble about that, but the characters would tell you it's nothing of the sort, it's just what they do, every single day. Buy this series. It's intriguingly full of the sort of dilemmas that real cops in a city with a super-powered crime spree might experience, and makes you look at the superhero genre in a different way.
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