The Red Scare Murders

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?

Con Lehane’s books include the 42nd Street Library mysteries, featuring Raymond Ambler, curator of the library’s (fictional) crime fiction collection, as well as three noirish mysteries in which bartender Brian McNulty muddles his way through the crime-infested streets of New York in the 1980s. Con’s published stories in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. Over the years, he’s been a community college professor, union organizer, labor journalist, and has tended bar at two dozen or so drinking establishments. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University School of the Arts and has taught fiction writing and mystery writing at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.