Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
The Badge Between Us
Duty, Marriage, and Famikly
by Terrence P. Dwyer
Bloomsbury Academic
Feb 2026, US$34, 210 pages, ISBN: 979-8881842550
Reminiscent of such police memoirs as Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood, or Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field and The Choirboys, The Badge Between Us is full of harrowing real crime investigations, but the narrative also focuses on the toll the job takes on family life. As a New York State Trooper, Terrence Dwyer spent more than two decades involved in criminal investigations. Now a university professor of legal studies at Western Connecticut State University and an attorney consulting on law enforcement issues and the author of Homeland Security Law: Issues and Analysis, Terrence Dwyer writes with real authority on the issues of crime and policing.
In the prologue, Dwyer tells the reader that The Badge Between Us was triggered by the “mundane task of clearing out a bedroom closet,” where he and his wife uncovered a treasure trove of memorabilia and documentation about the job, from scrapbooks filled with newspaper articles to court documents and personal notes. Dwyer and his wife Joan relive those tumultuous years, during which they raised three children. “For several days afterward, we talked more deeply about my police career than we ever had before.”
To say his wife Joan was ambivalent about Dwyer’s choice of careers is an understatement. Even before they married, she had declared to her friends that she would never marry a cop. The constant stress of possible injury or death was just too much. And yet, she did marry him. The two had met as sophomores at Fordham University. Dwyer comes off as a stand-up guy, and no doubt this is what attracted his wife to him, despite his choice of a career. “Bullies” is what motivated him to become a cop. “Criminals were bullies picking on the vulnerable. They had to be stopped. Others needed protection.”
The Badge Between Us is composed of three parts, “The Job,” “The Gang” and “The Fire.” It takes us through a chronological description of his years as a state trooper, beginning with his “baptism as a police officer,” which occurred at the Lincoln Towers housing project in Westchester County, on a June night less than three months after his graduation from the New York State Police Academy. The police are called to a drug-related scene of violence. Dwyer futilely performs CPR on a gunshot victim splayed across the sidewalk. Then the officers go in pursuit of the shooter, after the ambulance arrives to take care of the victims.
Dwyer describes the arduous police academy training, his wife Joan’s less-than-enthusiastic reactions. Separated for nearly half of their first year of marriage by this “boot camp” experience, the pattern of their lives is set. Joan is pregnant with their first child, a son named Brian, while Dwyer is at the police camp in Albany. Altogether, they have three kids; two daughters, Siobhan and Deirdre, follow Brian. Later, Dwyer wryly notes, “By the time Deirdre was in middle school, she had the habit of asking Joan, ‘who got killed?’ whenever she woke to find me already out of the house.”
Dwyer describes in vivid detail different homicides and suicides that he encounters in his first years as an officer. “My first station assignment was like the Wild West,” he notes, and then he elaborates. Five troopers lost their lives during his first two years, giving real credence to his wife’s anxiety.
While going into lengthy detail about some of the most thrilling and anxious crime events, the main story is about his family and how the job affected his marriage. Dwyer writes, “The closest we came to divorce resulted from an argument prompted by my moodiness and anger…” The stress of his job even at times drove him to alcohol, though for Dwyer it was never the problem that it was with so many of his colleagues. His older daughter had a word for it. “Siobhan, while in middle school, came up with a term for my moods. ‘Why is Dad so growly?’”
A whole chapter is devoted to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. “For three weeks after 9/11, I worked with the FBI and other federal agencies knocking on doors and interviewing people as part of the nationwide Operation PENTTBOM (acronym used for Pentagon and Twin Tower Bombing) investigation.”
Like his father before him, Dwyer attended law school. He went at night to Pace University, starting early on in his police career. For Joan, this brought the hope that her husband would apply for a job in the district attorney’s office in Westchester County, but Dwyer still had a yen for policework, even after passing the bar exam in both Connecticut and New York. She resigned herself to his decision. “Joan went along, patiently and lovingly,” he writes. With a degree in Biology from Fordham, Joan took nursing classes to become an RN, after they’d been married for a while.
“The Gang” section involves his assignment to investigate an inner-city drug ring, the Crazed Killas Mafia. Dwyer describes the various members of CKM – criminals nicknamed Domino and Squid and Halfway and Kango and Hi-Hi (whose real name is Hiram Wiggins).In the end, all of the CKM members either plead guilty or go to trial, a successful outcome despite the real toll it takes on his family life. In one telling example, he hears noises in his backyard and packs a gun to investigate, certain it is the gang come to silence him. It’s actually his neighbor looking for his lost dog. Shaken, he tells Joan, “The neighbor from across the street looking for his dog. I nearly shot him.” The final section, “The Fire,” involves the quintuple murder of a young family and is equally gruesome.
The title of the book, The Badge Between Us, brings to mind how the badge is a symbol that both unites the family and acts as a kind of barrier between them. Terrence Dwyer’s is a direct, descriptive, muscular prose style that keeps the reader on the edge of his/her seat while evoking a real sympathy for his wife Joan and their family. True-to-life crime stories aren’t for everyone, but if the genre appeals to you, this one is the real deal.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.