The city’s landmark courthouse at 60 Centre St. is no stranger to vermin of all kinds.
But only attorney and author Kevin Egan is on a first-name basis with one of the 88-year-old building’s rats.
Egan introduces the rest of the world to Boris the rodent in “The Missing Piece,” his latest legal thriller set in the Lower Manhattan courthouse.
The tale is based loosely on a 1993 trial to determine ownership of the Sevso Treasure — 14 pieces of ancient Roman silver purchased by the Lord of Northampton and his friends, but claimed by the Hungarian government.
Egan, a senior troubleshooter and mediator for the court system, knew the case from his early days in the courthouse.
His first boss, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Beatrice Shainswit, presided over the month-long trial.
Hungary lost the battle for ownership of the $100 million treasure in the New York courts, although seven pieces were returned last year after the government paid $13.6 million.
Egan, 62, turned the trial into a thriller by jazzing up the tale with a courthouse shooting, a dead judge, a crippled court officer, an obsessive love, a dash of political corruption and a mystery about a $14 million silver urn.
“The trial is beside the point,” Egan said. “This is not a mystery about who wins a trial. It’s a treasure hunt that deals with several missing pieces. The silver, (the court officer) looking for a missing piece of his life.”
Both this novel (named in honor of poet Shel Silverstein’s book) and an earlier novel, “Midnight,” are set in the Manhattan Supreme Court building.
Egan chose the venue because of his familiarity with the building’s unique architecture, the court system and its disparate personalities.
With its sweeping steps, Corinthian colonnade and soaring internal rotunda, the courthouse is a popular backdrop for movies and TV series like “Law & Order” and “Blue Bloods.”
Egan prefers to use the building’s layout to amplify the tension in his page-turners.
Famed architect Guy Lowell initially designed a round courthouse to look like the Roman Coliseum. When forced to compromise on something smaller, he put a granite hexagon around a circle.
The innovative Lowell then created six corridors around the circle, like spokes on a wheel. Each corridor, while anchored by two large courtrooms, leads to a myriad of back hallways, stairwells, low-ceilinged rooms and storage cubbies.
In “The Missing Piece,” published last month, Egan sends one character on a frantic search of the building’s back alleys — including the subbasement, once designated as the Presidential bunker if the nation’s chief executive was in Manhattan during a nuclear attack.
In one of those cubbies, the character meets Boris, a rat with glow-in-the-dark eyes.
Egan lives in White Plains with his wife, a preschool teacher, and has two grown children. He writes his books by hand on yellow legal pads during his daily commute on Metro-North.
“I need my fingers curled around that pencil or a pen,” he explains. “I just think better.”
After typing the drafts each night into his home computer, Egan sends the results to his Kindle for review over breakfast coffee. As he reads, he takes notes for rewriting.
Back on Metro-North, “I’m ready to roll when the train rolls,” he says. At the rate of five pages a day, he takes about a year to write a book.
Egan is already well into his eighth novel. Look for the only guy left on Metro-North with his nose in a yellow legal pad and his fingers curled around a pencil.
