The Red Scare Murders
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
This wry, big-hearted noir brings 1950s New York to life, from the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen to the mansions of Riverdale, from Sing Sing to City Hall, with a gripping murder mystery laying bare the explosive conflicts between its big wheels, its working stiffs, its gangsters, and its dreamers.
July 1950: Mick Mulligan has just hung out his shingle as a private investigator in New York’s sweaty Hell’s Kitchen. A former Hollywood cartoonist who was blacklisted during a communist witch hunt, Mick is broke, divorced, and in need of a paying gig to make his child support payments. But maybe not this gig. First off, it’s impossible. Worse, it’s liable to get him killed.
Last year, universally reviled cab company owner Irwin Johnson was murdered. One of his drivers, an African American Communist Party member named Harold Williams, was arrested, tried, and found guilty, despite scant evidence. Now his execution date is two weeks away. New York City labor leader Duke Rogowski asks Mick to find fresh evidence that might buy Harold a stay of execution.
Lots of people might have wanted Irwin Johnson dead—anyone from his betrayed wife to his jilted mistresses’ jealous husbands to the mafiosi he was stealing business from. But no one has any reason to help Mick exonerate Harold Williams, and some of Irwin’s former associates are happy to take a blunt object to the head of anyone asking awkward questions. Yet Mick can’t abandon a potentially innocent man to the electric chair. Can he pull off a miracle?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lehane (Murder at the College Library) delivers a gratifying old-school PI novel set in the thick of the McCarthy era. WWII veteran Mick Mulligan had it all—a successful career as a Hollywood cartoonist, a comfortable salary, a lovely family—until he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. After losing his job and his wife, Mick fled to New York City and reinvented himself as a private investigator. His latest case lands him in a simmering cauldron of social unrest that could boil over at any moment. A year ago, Black cabbie and Communist Party member Harold Williams was convicted of murdering wealthy white taxi company owner Irwin Johnson. Harold is scheduled to be executed in just two weeks, but labor leader Duke Rogowski hires Mick to look into the case with hopes that he might exonerate Williams. A skeptical Mick digs in, soon discovering that the list of Harold's enemies is long, and coming around to the idea that the cabbie may, in fact, be a patsy. Lehane's pacing and hardboiled dialogue are hard to beat, and he makes the jittery paranoia of the period jump off the page. Fans of James Ellroy will get a kick out of this.
