Synopses & Reviews
A raw, explosive, genre-bending tour de force destined for comparison with Kate Atkinson's
Case Histories and Jonathan Lethem's
Motherless Brooklyn.
Josephine Flannigan should be dead by now. From an overdose, or a cop's bullet, or run down in some back alley. But after a childhood in Hell's Kitchen and a lifetime on drugs, by 1950 she's finally cleaned up her act and gotten out of trouble or so she thinks.
Things start to look up for Josephine when a suburban couple offers her $1,000 to help find their daughter, a Barnard student who's disappeared into the dark subculture of heroin addiction. But nothing is as simple as it seems. Joe's journey back into a world she thought she'd left behind becomes more vertiginous at every turn a harrowing descent into deceit and manipulation that makes it impossible to distinguish friend from foe, and leads her to a choice that will haunt her to the end of her days.
Review
"Good plot twists and a great noir ending seal the deal. Gran's previous books are in very different styles; perhaps she's finding herself in crime." Booklist
Review
"[O]riginal and compelling....A gripping mystery, but Gran's real success is in recreating 1950s New York...a mosaic of everything sad and ugly about addiction. Burroughs meets Hammett in this gritty, at times tragic, noir." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Gran treats us to a grim but oddly elegiac tour of the good-old, bad-old days." Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Dope is marred only by a murky ending that seems to come out of the blue. But getting to that end is some fun." Detroit Free Press
Review
"An astonishing novel, one that deserves a place of honor next to Hammett, Thompson and Chandler...one of the meanest, grittiest hard-boiled crime stories of ever written and the first great noir novel from the mind of a woman." Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press
Review
"A compulsive, dynamic read, written con brio a perfect noir pastiche but with a life and character all its own." Kate Atkinson, author of Case Histories
Review
"Tight and polished and exquisitely crafted." Robert B. Parker
Review
"If Raymond Chandler knew then what we know now, he might have written a book like this. Highly recommended." Lee Child, author of One Shot and Persuader
Review
"May be the most surprising read this year." Glamour
Synopsis
Josephine Flannigan should be dead by now. From an overdose, or a cop's bullet, or run down in some back alley. But, after a childhood in Hell's Kitchen and a lifetime on drugs, by 1950 she's finally cleaned up her act and gotten out of trouble...or so she thinks.
Synopsis
From the author of
Come Closer comes the most highly acclaimed-and unusual-thriller of the year. Josephine, a former addict, is offered a thousand dollars to find a suburban couple's missing daughter. But the search will take her into the dark underbelly of New York she thought she'd escaped-and a web of deceit that threatens to destroy her.
About the Author
Sara Gran grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in cultural anthropology in 1993. Her first novel,
Saturn's Return to New York, was published in 2001, and is being currently being developed into a film by Domenica Cameron-Scorcese. Her second novel,
Come Closer, was published in 2003 to overwhelming critical favor and has been optioned by the Weinstein Company/ Dimension Films. Her short stories have appeared in
Atlantic Unbound,
Small Spiral Notebook,
Haypenny, and the
Land-Grant College Review.
Before making a living as a writer, Ms. Gran worked as a bookseller in New York City. In 2004, she moved to New Orleans; her building, constructed in the 1800s, was among the few not damaged or flooded by Hurricane Katrina. She is currently at work on her fourth novel, set in New Orleans.