DIRTY METAL

A tabloid reporter pushes the envelope in this gritty debut.

New York in the 1990s is a complicated place, but Parker Snow knows every inch of it, from the tiny apartment on the Lower East Side she shares with her one-eyed cat, Nellie, to Sheepshead Bay, where she scouts rigged card games run by the Russian mafia. On the residential streets of Bensonhurst, near the office of the shady doctor who peddles the pills she relies on to keep her stress at bay, she meets her greatest challenge: the body of a young nursing student lying in a secluded doorway. Although her boss warns her not to stray from her assignment to cover organized crime rather than street crime, Parker sees the search for Carla Russo’s killer as an irresistible path to recovery from a past blunder so egregious that she can only bring herself to spill the tea in droplets. In a world where everyone’s a liar, Parker struggles to find the truth about the web of crime spreading from Brighton Beach throughout the city she calls home, about the murders of young women no one seems moved to investigate, and ultimately about herself. LaMothe’s language is electric, crackling with an energy that matches the overheated urban landscape she describes. As the author savors each detail, she crafts a puzzle in which the most improbable coincidences turn into the most compelling connections. In the end, she offers a beam of moral clarity in a setting cloaked in a million shades of gray, with a protagonist who appreciates the value of every one of them.

A bold debut befitting its bold heroine.