When two hijacked airliners struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Bernard B. Kerik was at the scene within moments. As the police commissioner of New York City, he worked with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to coordinate rescue efforts at Ground Zero, ensuring the city's safety and reassuring Americans with his strength, determination, and leadership.

These attacks marked the latest and most visible in a series of extraordinary challenges Kerik has faced throughout his singular law-enforcement career. From the sagging row houses of Paterson, New Jersey, to the cocaine fields of Colombia, from the razor wire of Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Kerik has dedicated his life to a single goal: fighting the injustice he sees around him.

And yet Bernard Kerik's most personal battle was not pitched on tough city streets but within himself. For even as he drove himself to seek justice in every corner of the world, this extraordinary man never looked back until he reached the top. And when he did, he faced the greatest unsolved case of his life -- the tragic mystery of his own mother, who abandoned her young son forty-one years ago.

The odyssey of Bernard B. Kerik is a poignant tale with lessons for all about what it means to be a good and brave man, and just how each of us should aspire to such ideals. A testament to courage in the service of honor, The Lost Son is a harrowing, inspirational, and uniquely American story.