Outerborough Blues
A Brooklyn Mystery
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful young French girl walks into a bar, nervously lights a cigarette, and begs the bartender for help in finding her missing artist brother. In a moment of weakness, the bartender—a lone wolf named Caesar Stiles with a chip on his shoulder and a Sicilian family curse hanging over him—agrees. What follows is a stylish literary mystery set in Brooklyn on the dawn of gentrification.
While Caesar is initially trying to earn an honest living at the neighborhood watering hole, his world quickly unravels. In addition to being haunted by his past, including a brother who is intent on settling an old family score, Caesar is being hunted down by a mysterious nemesis known as The Orange Man. Adding to this combustible mix, Caesar is a white man living in a deep-rooted African American community with decidedly mixed feelings about his presence. In the course of his search for the French girl's missing brother, Caesar tumbles headlong into the shadowy depths of his newly adopted neighborhood, where he ultimately uncovers some of its most sinister secrets.
Taking place over the course of a single week, Outerborough Blues is a tightly paced and gritty urban noir saturated with the rough and tumble atmosphere of early 1990s Brooklyn.
Andrew Cotto has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Men's Journal, Salon.com, Teachers & Writers magazine and The Good Men Project. He has an MFA in creative writing from The New School. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cotto follows his first novel, The Domino Effect (2011), with an ambitious noir thriller set in pre-gentrification Brooklyn. Caesar Stiles, a one-time drifter and rare white face in his predominantly African-American neighborhood, has settled down for a quiet existence working at a local bar. When Caesar agrees to help Colette, a damsel in distress from the south of France, find her missing art student brother, Jean-Baptiste Rennet, past family troubles complicate his mission. Caesar's violent brother, just released from prison, still blames Caesar for their older brother's death as a teenager and wants his share of their late mother's property. Caesar must also face the threat of a mysterious gangster he calls the Orange Man in his search for Jean-Baptiste. While Cotto's lyrical prose sometimes veers into the affected, he shows a strong sense for character and place in a novel that reads like Raymond Chandler taking dictation from Walt Whitman.
