Holy Ghost And The Harlot's Cross

Forty-Second Street, 1977. The marquees never go dark and neither does he.

He is nineteen, a St. Jude's Academy blazer buttoned over a body that still remembers every hand that's ever been laid on it wrong. He carries his grandmother's crucifix the way other men carry a blade. He believes, with the total clarity of the truly lost, that God has given him a list.

Her name is Serafina. She works the corner under a marquee with half its bulbs burned out, and she is, to him, the last untouched thing in a city built to ruin everything it touches. Every man who has hurt her — a landlord, a cop, a priest, a man named Rico who owns the block she stands on — becomes a station on a walk he is certain is holy.

He keeps something from each of them. He tells himself it's evidence. It's closer to a relic.

HOLY GHOST AND THE HARLOT'S CROSS is a gothic-noir descent through the Deuce at its ugliest and most alive — a story about faith curdled into obsession, mercy mistaken for murder, and a narrator who never once, from the first page to the last, tells you the whole truth.