In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that would come to be known as the Killing Fields.
On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker's death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier. In response to redlining and discriminatory housing practices, the Johnson administration passed the Housing and Urban Development Act in 1968. The Federal Housing Authority aimed to use this piece of legislation to help low-income families of color finally achieve homeownership. But they could never have predicted how banks, lenders, realtors, and corrupt FHA officials themselves would use the newly passed law to make victims of the very people they were supposed to help, and the devastation they would leave in their wake. A compulsively readable hybrid of true crime and investigative journalism, The Killing Fields of East New York reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots. Following the dual threads of the hunt for the network of criminals behind the first subprime mortgage scandal and the ensuing downfall of East New York, Stacy Horn weaves a compelling narrative of government failure, a desperate community, and ultimately the largest series of mortgage fraud prosecutions in American history. The Killing Fields of East New York deftly demonstrates how different types of crime are profoundly entangled, and how the crimes committed in nice suits and corner offices are just as destructive as those committed on the street.A School Library Journal Best Young Adult Book of 2024 - A Reactor Notable YA Horror Book of 2024 - A Parade Best Horror Book of 2024
From Gillian Flynn Books, a lyrical young adult horror by debut author Wen-yi Lee that's perfect for fans of She Is a Haunting, Stephen King's IT, and The Haunting of Hill House. Wen-yi Lee has crafted a dark and compelling supernatural mystery buoyed by earnestly written, queer-centric characters. I am enthralled! --Gillian Flynn Growing up in Slater, Isadora Chang never felt at ease in the repressive small town, even before she realized she was bisexual--but after the deaths of two childhood friends, Slater went from feeling claustrophobic to suffocating. So, Isa took off before the town could swallow her, too. Even though it meant leaving everything she knew behind, including her last surviving friend, Mason. When Isa's abusive father dies, however, she agrees to come back from art school just long enough to collect the inheritance. But then Mason turns up at the cemetery with a revelation and a plea: their friends were murdered by an evil that haunts the town, and he needs Isa to help stop it--before it takes anyone else. When Isa begins to hear strange songs on the wind, and eerie artwork fills her sketchbook that she can't recall drawing, she's forced to stop running and confront her past. Because something is waiting in the shadows of Slater's valleys, something that feeds on the pain and heartbreak of its children. Whatever it is, it knows Isa's back . . . and it won't let her escape again. Wen-yi Lee's young adult debut is an intimate and gripping exploration of trauma, healing, and the lasting power of friendship, as a runaway teen must finally face the sinister forces that defined her childhood, and in doing so, demand her right to survive.A USA TODAY Bestseller - A New York Times, Apple Books, and The Guardian Best Crime Novel of the Year - An Indie Next Pick - Winner of the Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction and the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Festival Emerging Writer Award - Longlisted for the Mass Book Award - A Finalist for the ITW Thrillerfest, New England Book, Left Coast Crime Lefty, and Anthony Awards - Best Author by Boston Magazine
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this unique and confident debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year - A New York Times Editors' Choice - An Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
The most fascinating debut I've read in years--enigmatic, biting, absurd, and right when you think you've got it figured out, utterly horrifying. --Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall and The Shape of Water (with Guillermo del Toro) A gripping, surreal mystery about language, identity, and greed. --Peng Shepherd, bestselling author of The CartographersMolly is one of the greatest young female characters I've had the luck of reading since I picked up Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead back in 2000 . . . I TRULY LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!! --Gillian Flynn, Gillian Flynn Books
Holly Wilson's Kittentits is sacred and profane, filled with big emotions, all amplified by grief. Molly is a wholly unique and charismatic narrator, navigating (and creating) chaos as she seeks out a way to hold onto both the living and dead. This is a wildly funny and utterly convincing coming-of-age novel like nothing I've read before. --Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
A New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2024
Sister Holiday is back with a newly minted PI apprentice certificate, a twisty mystery to solve, and something to prove in this fast-paced, blistering follow-up to Scorched Grace. Tattooed from her neck to her toes and sporting a gold tooth as sharp as her wisecracks, Sister Holiday struggles to stay on the righteous path. Never one to make things easy for herself, she's committed to taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and joining former fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux's latest venture, Redemption Detective Agency--both in service of satisfying her eternal quest for answers. When Sister Holiday and Riveaux set out to bust a philandering husband, they instead find the body of a priest floating in the swollen Mississippi River, and with it, Redemption's next case. It's significantly more gruesome than their orig-inal mission, but Sister Holiday feels called on by God to hunt down the murderer and keep her community safe. As a torrential rainstorm drowns New Orleans for three harrowing days over Easter weekend, Sister Holiday and Riveaux follow the clues. With the stakes rising alongside the relentless floodwaters, our favorite punk nun-sleuth throws herself into the deep end yet again. A lacerating and lyrical plunge into obsession, deception, and the questions that hold us captive, Blessed Water is a lights-out mystery that will leave you breathless.A New Yorker Best Book of the Year - A New York Times Editors' Choice - An Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
The most fascinating debut I've read in years--enigmatic, biting, absurd, and right when you think you've got it figured out, utterly horrifying. --Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall and The Shape of Water (with Guillermo del Toro) A gripping, surreal mystery about language, identity, and greed. --Peng Shepherd, bestselling author of The CartographersA CrimeReads Most Anticipated Fiction Novel of 2024 and Best Psychological Thriller for January - A Book Riot Most Anticipated Book of Jan-Jun 2024 - A Tertulia Best New Crime and Thriller Book This Winter - A Paste Most Anticipated Mystery and Thriller Book of 2024
Two young women vanish in a seaside town. At the cliff's edge, nobody is who they seem.
It's 1992, and ten-year-old Molly is tired of living in the fire-rotted, nun-haunted House of Friends: a Semi-Cooperative Living Community of Peace Faith(s) in Action with her formerly blind dad and grieving Evelyn. But when twenty-three-year-old Jeanie, a dirt bike-riding ex-con with a questionable past, moves in, she quickly becomes the object of Molly's adoration. She might treat Molly terribly, but they both have dead moms and potty mouths, so naturally Molly can't seem to leave Jeanie alone.
When Jeanie fakes her own death in a hot-air balloon accident, Molly runs away to Chicago with just a stolen credit card and a sweet pair of LA Gear Heatwaves to meet her pen pal Demarcus and hunt down Jeanie. What follows is a race to New Year's Eve, as Molly and Demarcus plan a séance to reunite with their lost moms in front of a live audience at the World's Fair. A surrealist and bold take on the American coming-of-age novel, Holly Wilson's debut is about the interstices of loss, grief, and friendship.When possession threatens to destroy the ones she loves, a former child medium is forced to face her deadly inheritance and the ghosts she left behind in this electrifying debut.
Girls for the gifts, boys for the grave. Alice Haserot thought she'd escaped the curse. For sixteen years, she's lived far from her family and the ghosts she used to conjure. But her past isn't so easily left behind. When Alice discovers she's pregnant and her estranged sister, Bronwyn, turns up on her doorstep, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn offers an ultimatum: one of her daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their abusive mother and expose her location. Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice returns home to face the inheritance of her family curse. Tautly paced and gorgeously written, Glass Girls explores the deep, complicated bonds of family and the shadows that follow us, no matter how far we run.A New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2024
Sister Holiday is back with a newly minted PI apprentice certificate, a twisty mystery to solve, and something to prove in this fast-paced, blistering follow-up to Scorched Grace. Tattooed from her neck to her toes and sporting a gold tooth as sharp as her wisecracks, Sister Holiday struggles to stay on the righteous path. Never one to make things easy for herself, she's committed to taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and joining former fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux's latest venture, Redemption Detective Agency--both in service of satisfying her eternal quest for answers. When Sister Holiday and Riveaux set out to bust a philandering husband, they instead find the body of a priest floating in the swollen Mississippi River, and with it, Redemption's next case. It's significantly more gruesome than their orig-inal mission, but Sister Holiday feels called on by God to hunt down the murderer and keep her community safe. As a torrential rainstorm drowns New Orleans for three harrowing days over Easter weekend, Sister Holiday and Riveaux follow the clues. With the stakes rising alongside the relentless floodwaters, our favorite punk nun-sleuth throws herself into the deep end yet again. A lacerating and lyrical plunge into obsession, deception, and the questions that hold us captive, Blessed Water is a lights-out mystery that will leave you breathless.A USA TODAY Bestseller - A New York Times, Apple Books, and The Guardian Best Crime Novel of the Year - An Indie Next Pick - Winner of the Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction - Longlisted for the Mass Book Award - A Finalist for the ITW Thrillerfest, New England Book, Left Coast Crime Lefty, and Anthony Awards
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this unique and confident debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
A School Library Journal Best Young Adult Book of 2024
From Gillian Flynn Books, a lyrical young adult horror by debut author Wen-yi Lee that's perfect for fans of She Is a Haunting, Stephen King's IT, and The Haunting of Hill House. Wen-yi Lee has crafted a dark and compelling supernatural mystery buoyed by earnestly written, queer-centric characters. I am enthralled! --Gillian Flynn Growing up in Slater, Isadora Chang never felt at ease in the repressive small town, even before she realized she was bisexual--but after the deaths of two childhood friends, Slater went from feeling claustrophobic to suffocating. So, Isa took off before the town could swallow her, too. Even though it meant leaving everything she knew behind, including her last surviving friend, Mason. When Isa's abusive father dies, however, she agrees to come back from art school just long enough to collect the inheritance. But then Mason turns up at the cemetery with a revelation and a plea: their friends were murdered by an evil that haunts the town, and he needs Isa to help stop it--before it takes anyone else. When Isa begins to hear strange songs on the wind, and eerie artwork fills her sketchbook that she can't recall drawing, she's forced to stop running and confront her past. Because something is waiting in the shadows of Slater's valleys, something that feeds on the pain and heartbreak of its children. Whatever it is, it knows Isa's back . . . and it won't let her escape again. Wen-yi Lee's young adult debut is an intimate and gripping exploration of trauma, healing, and the lasting power of friendship, as a runaway teen must finally face the sinister forces that defined her childhood, and in doing so, demand her right to survive.