Outerborough Blues

April 16, 2012
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. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson and Lerner.

June 1, 2012
A highly unlikely detective pursues the even more unlikely trail of a missing man during Holy Week in Brooklyn. Colette Rennet's brother Jean-Baptist is missing--he stopped attending classes at the Brooklyn Art Institute soon after matriculating--and she doesn't know where he's gone. So she wanders into The Notch, a bar whose owner is universally known as the Captain, and asks Caesar Stiles, the bartender, to find him. Caesar has no experience as a detective, but his experience with crime is intimate and extensive. His grandmother emigrated from Sicily specifically to kill the man who'd traveled to America to escape her; his beloved brother Angie was struck and killed by a train during a fist fight that had migrated to the tracks; and his fearsome brother Sallie is doing time for maiming the man who nearly killed him in another fight. Caesar duly asks questions of Professor Reginald Hamersley, Jean-Baptist's art teacher; his landlady, liquor-store owner Lillian Pettaway; his neighborhood real-estate mogul Will Page, who buys buildings and flips them; and his own friend Don Brown, a one-man construction crew. But any sense of forward motion is undercut by a torrent of anecdotal memories that pull Caesar back to his travels across the U.S., the women he's loved, the men he's fought and his troubled family history. Long before Easter Sunday dawns, present and past will have merged in a definite enough resolution but no clear sense of arriving at a destination. First-time novelist Cotto's shaggy, dreamlike saga begins with a curse and ends with a redemption of sorts. What's in between is a lot less clear.

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May 1, 2012
At the beginning of Cotto's cool, dark debut, bartender Caesar Stiles recounts how his Sicilian grandmother came to the New World with an Old World motive to murder the man that had left her for America. Unlike his relatives, Caesar doesn't want conflict and is doing his best to live a peaceful life: pouring drinks at a gritty Brooklyn watering hole called the Notch and listening to others' woes. His world is turned upside down doing the latter when a comely Parisian named Colette saunters through the door and asks for help finding her missing artist brother. As a white man in a predominantly African American neighborhood, Caesar is already conspicuous. Now his search for Colette's sibling thrusts him even more into the spotlightand into the crosshairs of some sinister souls, including a creepy guy known only as the Orange Man. Meanwhile, Caesar's bully of a brother, Sallie, is out of prison and dead set on settling some old scores. Cotto, who lives in Brooklyn, evokes a New York state of mind in this well-crafted urban noir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)