New Yorked

April 13, 2015
Set in New York City, Hart’s edgy debut introduces a down-and-out sometime PI, Ashley McKenna, who wakes up one afternoon in his Lower East Side apartment from a drunken blackout to find a cry for help from his girlfriend, Chell, on his smartphone. He soon learns he’s too late: Chell’s body, showing signs of sexual assault, has been found in a Queens junkyard. Driven by a mix of anger, guilt, and depression, Ash sets out to find Chell’s killer. He wanders from bar to bar in a world that seems to function on a mixture of alcohol and nicotine, with occasional infusions of cocaine. Following bewildering clues through the city’s boroughs, omitting only the Bronx, he encounters bizarre characters with names such as Bombay, Ivy Archer, Snow White, and the King of Hipsters. The book’s relentless pacing and strong sense of place compensate for the incoherent plot line, which prevents it from being truly effective. Agent: Bree Ogden, D4EO Literary Agency.

April 15, 2015
An unlicensed private eye prowls New York in search of the man who murdered his nasty girlfriend.Ash McKenna, born of a Coney Island firefighter but long established on the Lower East Side, considers himself "a blunt instrument"; his childhood friend Bombay calls him "the most brilliant stupid person I know." His favored drink is Jameson's, but he's trying to stay sober until he finds the lowlife who murdered Chell, a Greenpoint exotic dancer and aspiring actress, hours after she left him a message begging for protection from some unnamed guy while Ash was out getting hammered. Ash's inquiries, if you can call them that, take him from district leader Ginny Tonic, the transgender queen of the Lower East Side, to Good Kelly and Bad Kelly, the former moving to Austin, the latter sleeping with a cop, with stops along the way at every neighborhood dive that might interest or shock Ash's cousin Margo, who's visiting from Pennsylvania to check out NYU. He looks for Fanny Fatale, a dancer Chell beat out for a gig, and makes time with Joel Cairo, Iva Archer, and Terry Lennox, who've borrowed their names from the work of genre masters to whom Hart poses no threat. But there's not much of a mystery, not even much of a story, just an after-dark tour of Gotham's seediest, kinkiest haunts while you're waiting for the inevitable modishly ironic anticlimax. Though Ash's arch world-weariness and the freak-show fleshpots are bound to attract tourists, you can't help feeling that Hart's making it all up as he goes along.

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May 1, 2015
Ash McKenna is a noir hero with a difference. He establishes his Hammett-Chandler bloodline at once, speaking of whiskey-colored sunlight. He does PI work, finding lost souls, and he is handy with his fists. The curious element is his romantic obsession. He is sick of an old passion, as the poem goes. His hell begins when his girl calls him begging for help. He is drunk. Next morning, he finds she was murdered moments afterward. Vengeance begins. His friends sense something sickly even in this extreme situation: You loved that gal too hard, one says, And she carried it like a burden. His hunt takes him through post-9/11 New York, here a creepy place dominated by creatures of the night. Faces are smashed before Ash learns the truth about the girl's murder, but he loves the pain best: Big wounds, even when they do heal, they don't heal right. There are good action scenes and nice offbeat characters, but what lingers is the swoony dialogue: You and me on that roof, floating amongst the stars. Noir with a tingle of doomed-but-sweet romance, like Matthew McBride's A Swollen Red Sun (2014).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)