It is 1950s New York and heroin has flooded the streets. Josephine Flannigan sure has picked a dumb time to give it up. Now, she's reduced to boosting jewellery to get by. So, when she's offered a thousand bucks to find Nadine, a good girl turned dope fiend, she's more than happy to give it a go. As Josephine spirals through a cast of streetwalkers and conmen in dive bars and fleapit hotels, it becomes clear that the world she thinks she knows so well is about to turn round and bite her.

A pitch-black mystery. (Washington Post)

Tight and polished and exquisitely crafted. (Robert B. Parker)

An oddly elegiac tour of the good-old, bad-old days. (New York Times Book Review)

One of the meanest, grittiest hard-boiled crime stories ever written... (Associated Press)

[A] pitch-black mystery. (Washington Post)

Totally shocking. (Times Picayune)

Nicely twisted. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Triple-axel plot twists...nearly every page has surprises. (Los Angeles Times)

[An] oddly elegiac tour of the good-old, bad-old days. (New York Times Book Review)

[A] pitch-black mystery. (Washington Post)