Alice Lee is eighteen years-old when she takes off from her small Wisconsin town, drawn like a moth to the bright lights of New York City. With only six hundred dollars and a vintage Leica camera to her name, she has no idea what she wants to do with her life, only that she wants…
Ecologically, New York City is an estuary; a giant, cleansing filter. Figuratively it is the same, and I know of no place on earth that can be so described in identical terms as accurate as they are disparate. Among the many gifts bestowed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, there is revolutionary 18th century NYC as…
Will Way is the first person called out whenever there’s a police officer-involved shooting in Brooklyn. A union representative from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, he gets forty-eight hours with the officers involved before anyone else does, whether it be the cops’ own bosses, Internal Affairs or the District Attorney’s office. His job is to look…
Shoot the Moonlight Out by William Boyle is a haunting crime story about the broken characters inhabiting yesterday’s Brooklyn and a riveting portrait of lives crashing together at the turn of the century. With his new novel, Shoot the Moonlight Out, named after a song by Garland Jeffreys, William Boyle continues his explorations into the…
Author Peter Blauner discusses Christ in Concrete, an often-overlooked novel about the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s and a twelve-year-old boy who must support his family after his father’s untimely death. Most crime novels try to hook you on the first page, or even the first…
On the morning of November 20, 1960, author Norman Mailer almost murdered his wife. His second wife, that is: Adele Morales Mailer. The oft-married Mailer (he tallied up six wives in all) is both famous and infamous for so many reasons that too often, Adele’s name goes missing. She’s often written off, at best, as…
Lawrence Block published A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, the ninth book featuring his iconic detective Matthew Scudder, in 1991 (it won the Edgar in 1992). It takes place in an increasingly unfamiliar world to modern readers. Scudder, a recovering alcoholic and former cop, regularly stalks the “Duce,” as they used to call the pre-gentrified stretch…
A Dangerous Engagement is the stylish, charming sixth novel in the Edgar-nominated Amory Ames mystery series by Ashley Weaver, set in 1930s New York. There were four or five shots fired in rapid succession followed by a moment of deafening silence. I jumped up from the bed, but Milo had beaten me to it,…
Devotion by Madeline Stevens is a debut novel about a woman who falls into an overwhelming mutual obsession with the Upper East Side mother who hires her as a nanny.
During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot. Unable to pinpoint where the shot came from, the FBI turns to the one man who might be able to help them—former FBI agent Lucas Page. The Summer of 2019…
