Dirty Metal

LaMothe resurrects the grungy New York City of the early 1990s in this solid debut thriller centered on a pill-popping tabloid journalist. Parker Snow has been The New York Street’s crime reporter (“no qualifiers”) for seven years, but after she bungles a big story, she’s reassigned to the organized crime beat in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where she’s tasked with investigating gangsters who have moved to the States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Though Parker takes pains to stay in her lane, she can’t repress her curiosity when she discovers the dead body of 20-year-old Carla Russo, who appears to be the victim of a fatal mugging, during a night out. With the cops assigned to Carla’s case treating the dead woman as just “another pin in the crime map,” Parker starts investigating on her own. She doubles her efforts when another young woman is found dead under near-identical circumstances in Manhattan’s Chinatown, raising the prospect that a serial killer might be stalking the streets of New York. LaMothe hits the beats of a satisfying neo-noir—a deliciously dark atmosphere, a wounded hero, a corrupt urban underbelly—with ease. Fans of reporter-sleuths like Bruce DeSilva’s Liam Mulligan will hope to hear more from Parker soon. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Book Group. (Feb.)