The Midnight Band of Mercy
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
This bizarre mystery based on real historical events is “an entertaining romp through New York of the 1890s” (The Washington Post).
In 1893, Max Greengrass is a stringer for the New York Herald, paid by the column inch. With no regular salary, Max must hustle for his stories, and late one night he nearly trips over one. He finds four cats lined up neatly on a Greenwich Village sidewalk. They have no visible wounds, but are undeniably dead.
The story makes the paper and Max pursues it, from low dives to posh mansions, from a proper if eccentric society of refined ladies concerned about the suffering of stray felines, to a bizarre conspiracy of churchly landlords and respected insurers who are getting rich by exploiting the misery of others. And it doesn’t stop there. The facts he uncovers suggest dark ideas Max can barely contemplate, arousing suspicions that terrify him. He goes to meet a source in a deserted saloon, only to find the man as dead as the cats that started it all. Soon his worst fears come to life. The story Max is stalking now stalks him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Max Greengrass, the hero of this engaging mystery by Blaine (The Desperate Season), has much in common with David Liss's hero Benjamin Weaver. Both are Jews in a world of gentiles: for Weaver, it's 18th-century London, for Greengrass, the sidewalks and saloons of lower Manhattan in 1893. Both are ex-prize fighters, as well as amateur detectives, whose murder investigations take place against a background of real and imagined events and uncover plots surprisingly sinister and far-reaching. Max is a young freelance reporter ("a space-rater") at the New York Herald, and his future hangs on getting a good story. When he finds four dead cats arranged in a row on a Greenwich Village sidewalk, and soon learns of more murdered felines, he's got a good scoop. After the Herald publishes his catricide story, Greengrass continues to nose around. When his most promising lead turns up dead, as does a witness to that murder, Greengrass's widening investigations introduce the reporter and the reader to a colorful mix of real and fictional politicians, religious figures, reformers, journalists and power brokers. Blaine's portrait of Manhattan in 1893 is striking both for what doesn't exist yet (sanitation, most graphically) and what does: Pete's Tavern on Irving Place, expensive dinners at the Waldorf, the Staten Island Ferry, Bellevue Hospital. The 19th-century local color makes a good mystery even more enjoyable.
