Walking the Perfect Square introduced Moe Prager, retired New York City cop-turned-wine shop owner, to much acclaim and an enthusiastic readership. Still possessed of his vintage police savvy, and perhaps the only Jewish licensed PI in the five boroughs, Moe wonders if he's really meant to be a m...
PROTAGONIST: Moe Praeger, PISETTING: Brooklyn, New York - 1978 and 1998SERIES: #1 of 4RATING: 4.0At one time, Moe Prager was an officer with the NYPD, admittedly, not a very good one, although he did love the job. He's been forced to retire due to an injury. Contrary to expectations, he wasn't ...
It’s 1983 and Reaganomics is in full swing. But beneath the facade of junk bonds and easy money, New York remains a gritty metropolis offering Nirvana with one hand and desolation with the other. Moe Prager, ex-NYPD cop turned reluctant P.I. is too busy reeling from a family tragedy to see what’s...
Their deep purple stage was definitely my favorite. I looked good in dark colors. As for my ribs. . . They were still sore, but it now took more than the brush of a careless hand to set me into convulsions. I decided to skip my follow-up visit with Doc Cohen until the painkillers ran out. MacClou...
I wasn’t going to argue with her. The thought of seeing her again gave me that happy nervousness I hadn’t experienced since I’d been with Carmella. Like I said, I was no monk and there had been no shortage of women to warm the other side of my bed, but there hadn’t been any buzz with them beyond ...
I had been here before on many such late spring nights when I was a kid. Back then, in ancient times, before shopping malls, iPhones, or texting, it was a place to meet friends or girls or to go on tentative first dates. A lot, maybe too much, about the world had changed to suit me, but there was...
But that period of his schooling had come to a close seventy years ago. Now there remained but one last thing to learn of death, and that lesson would come soon enough. Weisen neither feared death—he had seen it in all its permutations so that he understood there was a kind of peace in it—nor wel...
The first time we met, she was cursing at her partner in the lobby of my old precinct house, the Six-O in Coney Island. The first words she ever said to me were, “Yo! You got a problem?” Nice, huh? The thing was, I had been staring at her. Her looks, in spite of the tough-bitch demeanor and foul ...
Within spitting distance of the Verrazano Bridge, Cara Mia was an old-style Italian joint on Fourth Avenue. It was cheap and charming and perfect for first dates. The waiters had been there so long they bled red sauce and there was more garlic in the air than oxygen. The tablecloths were red and ...
“Don’t you want your new phone? It’ll only take a few minutes for us to transfer the—” “No,” I said. “I really don’t. I’ll pick it up in a couple of days.” It was to laugh, the expression on her face. She seemed to view the very concept of removing one’s self from the world of Angry Birds and Yel...
My new room was much like my old room, as it was like almost every other room at the hotel. The Paragon wasn’t the kind of place with bridal or presidential suites. It wasn’t the kind of place with suites at all. There were some larger rooms on the top floor that the original owners had built to ...
He ducked. Swoosh! Crack! Gulliver had had a baseball bat swung at his head before, so he knew the feeling. He felt the rush of air over his head and heard the aluminum smack against the brick of his building. Without thinking, he placed his right palm flat on the pavement. Anchored, he thrust ou...
He reminded me that the inn was going to throw its weekly fish fry tonight. I thanked him, but told him I’d have to take a pass on the fried fish. Before parting company, I asked him to deliver two cups of coffee to the campus security officers parked across the street in the blue minivan. The cl...
Parker’s Debt to Pay SIXTY-SEVEN Ari picked Diana and Jesse up at eight. It was a casual-dress night, so that allowed Diana to carry her piece under a loose-fitting blue blazer. She got dropped off at the Hunsicker place. Ari took Jesse over to Javier’s Gourmet Mexicano Restaurant. Jesse didn’t k...
The time since Christmas dinner passed with accelerating momentum: each day evaporating faster than the day before it until there was only one tomorrow left. I no longer gave much thought to the death of Lance Mabry and when I did, I felt foolish for ever entertaining my old narcissism. The day I...