A Wonderful Town

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The New York Sun

One of the great pleasures of reading good mystery fiction (or most good fiction, come to think of it) is being transported to a place and shown things you didn’t know, or even suspect. We’ve all read books by writers who place their characters in a town or city that never comes to life. Those same characters could be plucked off the streets of Chicago, say, and plunked down in Phoenix, and nothing would change.


But it would be unimaginable to remove Boston and its environs from the works of Dennis Lehane or Robert B. Parker and think they would be the same. Or try to consider Laura Lippman setting her stories in Seattle instead of her gritty Baltimore. The same is true of the lyricism of James Lee Burke’s New Orleans or the Detroit of Loren D. Estleman or Elmore Leonard. Read a handful of books by George Pelecanos: You’ll think you know more about Washington, D.C., than most of its inhabitants. Ditto the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly or Robert Crais.


As much fun as it is to read and learn about other cities, for a New Yorker to read about his burg is a special privilege. There is, certainly, the comfortable sense of being at home when you recognize a street, or a shop, or a neighborhood. But there’s also the thrill of discovery when you realize a place you’ve never seen is right there, a short subway ride away, and it’s as foreign to you as Casablanca. Several good New York City books have just come out, and I can recommend them all on some level.


The best, for several reasons, is Ethan Black’s “At Hell’s Gate” (Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $24), which may be my favorite novel of the year. As a book that meets the criteria for being something special for those interested in New York, it succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation. You’ve probably heard of Hell Gate, but you may not be able to pinpoint it on a map, and you may be able only to speculate on how it got its name. No longer, if you read Mr. Black’s breathtaking thriller.


This first-rate police novel features Conrad Voort, the Jaguar-driving multimillionaire detective descended from a family that has been doing police work in New York since it was a Dutch colony, and his partner, the erratic Mickie, who won millions playing the stock market, got greedy, and lost it all – plus his house. When Voort and his luscious fiancee, Camilla, kayak in the East River near the treacherous Hell Gate, they come across a floater, a cab driver who turns out to have been obsessed by a $600 million sunken treasure – until he was murdered and tossed into the river.


As Voort investigates the seemingly motiveless crime, he stumbles across the paths of a ruthless criminal and the high-priced mercenaries he employs to keep him safe from harm.


In a scene you don’t want to read if you’re squeamish, Voort is captured by the hired thugs and brought to a deserted garage, where he is threatened with sexual debasement to himself and to members of his large family, and finally their wholesale slaughter. He can save himself and his family only by promising to leave the country for two weeks.


When Voort is released and brings the terrible dilemma to a family meeting, the 10 other family members on the police force vote for him to acquiesce. He takes Camilla on a vacation, but his humiliation is so emotionally corrosive that he leaves her after a week, using a disguise and an alias to hunt down those responsible. The chase, the intellectual manipulation of adversaries and the climactic scene are nail-bitingly exciting, and if this doesn’t become a major movie, I’ll be baffled.


Significantly different, except in its use of New York City as what can only be described as a principal character, is Jim Fusilli’s “Hard, Hard City” (Putnam, 288 pages, $24.95). Although I am a great fan of Mr. Fusilli’s work, most notably “Closing Time,” this fourth novel is not much of an immediate attention-grabber. Too many pages devoted to the basketball efforts and shortcomings of private eye Terry Orr’s precocious teenaged daughter Bella, and the courtroom efforts of his girlfriend, assistant D.A. Julie Giada. Things eventually pick up in a search for a missing teenager that leads to murder. But for a tough, private-eye novel, the pacing in the first third of the book is just too leisurely.


No one could ever accuse Lorenzo Carcaterra’s books of being too leisurely. The superb “Paradise City” (Ballantine, 335 pages, $24.95) puts an exclamation mark on that. Giancarlo, the 15-year-old son of a man murdered in New York by the Camorra, the Neapolitan branch of the Mafia, vows vengeance on Don Nicola Rossi, the man who ordered the killing. The family returns to Naples, where Lo becomes a great policeman, focusing on the Camorra and wreaking so much damage to it on both sides of the Atlantic that Rossi wants him taken out. He kidnaps the cop’s niece in New York, setting up a trap that Lo has to step into in order to save the girl.


Mr. Carcaterra knows the streets of New York, as evidenced by his controversial debut, “Sleepers,” and his role as writer and producer for the hit TV series, “Law & Order.” He used that knowledge extensively in this fast paced adventure, including taking readers to Little Italy – no, not the one being swallowed up by Chinatown on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but the larger one in the East Bronx, where Anthony Avenue still sports some terrific pasta-with-red-sauce restaurants. The result is pure storytelling joy, with some eye-popping surprises along the way.


New York: If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. Ethan Black, Jim Fusilli, and Lorenzo Carcaterra have made it, providing us Gothamites with outstanding neon-lit noir.



Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.


The New York Sun

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