Love the Stranger (A Queens Mystery Book 2)

“Brisk punchy chapters, constant action and tension, and an urban stew of nationalities make this a very spicy mystery with lives and families at stake at every turn.”

Love the Stranger is a rapid-paced and suspenseful follow-up to Tower of Babel (2022) and shows off the best of modern urban crime fiction, as Michael Sears takes Queens attorney Ted Molloy once more into conflict.

Molloy’s developed a strange law practice, one that depends on research to constantly track down cases he may be able to quickly win—or else make money from, whether directly or by assisting with a just-in-time loan within the court system. His current researcher, Lester McKinley, tracks down county files of commercial real estate in trouble. Lester in turn coordinates a larger group of independent researchers and manages the daily business operations. That leaves Molloy, still barely scrambling upward from many bad decisions in his past, the time and energy he wants to invest in his girlfriend Kenzie’s justice-oriented campaign.

With such reliance on Lester, it’s natural that Molloy goes along to check out Lester’s new apartment. Who could guess he’d get kidnapped and beaten by a couple of guys who think he’s Lester? (Lester’s both aging and black, and Ted Molloy isn’t either of those, so the kidnappers are losers by definition.)

Surviving the episode doesn’t clear up the bottom-line mistake that Ted and Lester have made: One of their big recent loans is to part of the very “connected” local mob, and when cash flow gets tight, this client’s reaction is to pound a longer-term loan contract into those bodies on hand. And that’s not just a problem in terms of logistics and comfort, but also in terms of Ted’s easily disturbed domestic partnership with Kenzie, who can’t stand the distraction from her primary goal: defeating an outrageous real-estate development in the community, a development sponsored (of course) by related dirty money. And Kenzie may share domesticity with Ted, but not in a cozy kind of way. Here’s insight from the author into this feisty and angry woman as she demands Ted’s assistance for one of her workers:

“Kenzie admitted to herself that she could be a pest. It was what made her good at her job. People who valued polite persuasion over political effectiveness were not drawn to the role of community activist. She knew how to hammer and felt no shame in it. Mohammed needed help. Ted could provide it. She was a pest. So be it. But Ted Molloy was a jerk.”

That might be enough conflict to carry some ordinary crime novel, but Sears always ramps up the tension and risk—in this case, with a Trojan horse of a gift to Kenzie and thus to Ted, in the form of a very skilled volunteer income just out of a law program and ready to solve the daily tangles of social media, spreadsheets, and public relations that digital non-natives find so daunting. What’s that rule about looking a gift horse in the mouth? Ted and Kenzie maybe forgot about it.

So when Ted and Kenzie both try to solve Mohammed’s immigration issues that have been manipulated by an unscrupulous lawyer emphatically not in the business of justice, and there’s a bloody murder, who’s going to get blamed? Yes, welcome to advanced risk, danger, and, for the persecuted, injustice, in this most diverse of New York City’s five boroughs (and maybe least known outside of the region), Queens.

Brisk punchy chapters, constant action and tension, and an urban stew of nationalities make this a very spicy mystery with lives and families at stake at every turn. This second from a Wall Street business exec who’s already winning awards is a gem for the shelves, and already a classic of New York City noir.