Love the Stranger

July 1, 2024

In the sequel to the Nero Award-winning Tower of Babel, attorney Ted Molloy has been helping his girlfriend, Kenzie, in her work to stop a development project in Queens, NY, that will displace immigrant communities. When Kenzie snoops around a corrupt immigration lawyer's office, she finds a dead body. Now Ted has another murder to solve. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2024
Ted Molloy, who we last saw in 2020's Nero Award-winning Tower of Babel, is what you might call a crusader. The Queens, New York, lawyer isn't really happy unless he has a cause to fight for. When his girlfriend, Kenzie, stumbles upon a dead body while she's doing a favor for a friend, Ted and Kenzie wonder whether this might have a connection to a new development project (which, coincidentally, or perhaps not, Kenzie has been leading the fight to stop) that will destroy the lives of the immigrants who call the area their home. They're determined to find the killer, and stop the construction project, but are they willing to risk their lives to do it? Sears, who's known to mystery fans primarily as the author of the Jason Stafford series, is a first-rate storyteller, and Ted Molloy is a well-crafted character; let's hope the author gives us another Molloy mystery, and soon.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2024
Ready for a walk on the seamy side of contemporary New York social policy? Sears has your number, and everyone else's. Life's not easy for Haidir Khalil. Even though his mother has finally won American citizenship, he's afraid of getting caught up in an ICE dragnet, losing his job at Manny Singh's Fruit & Produce, and getting shipped back to Yemen at 14. Nor is life easy for Haidir's stepfather, Mohammed Al Fazal Mahdi, who owes more than $40,000 to immigration lawyer Howard Spitzer, who has yet to produce any significant development in a case that should be routine. And when you come to think of it, life's not even easy for Stop the Spike activist McKenzie Zielinski and Ted Molloy, her live-in lawyer, who employ Mahdi as a driver. They share a cramped apartment, spend every waking hour trying to keep greedy developers like Ron Reisner from expanding their empires further at tremendous cost to the locals and their city, are subject to abduction by unsatisfied mob bosses' henchmen, and struggle to counter the false news stories that are spread about them after Kenzie finds Spitzer dead in his office, and Det. Duran of the NYPD takes a serious interest in her. Ignoring the obvious motives of Bruce Hillyer, Spitzer's partner--whose wife was having an affair with Spitzer--Duran loses his interest in pinning the murder on Kenzie only when he decides that the figure she glimpsed fleeing Spitzer's office was actually Haidir. On the way to unmasking an anticlimactic perp, Sears finds dirt on every bite of the Big Apple. Though the protagonists survive more or less intact, there's bound to be steady work awaiting them next time.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 30, 2024
Queens, N.Y., attorney Ted Molloy gets entangled in another case of murder and real estate in Sears’s arresting sequel to Tower of Babel. Ted and his business partner, Lester McKinley, have begun using their legal expertise to invest in foreclosed properties and broker dubious loans with local mobsters. They’re also advising Ted’s girlfriend, activist Kenzie Zielinski, as she tries to stop a development project aimed at gentrifying Corona, Queens, and pricing out its largely immigrant community. As Kenzie’s opposition efforts heat up, she asks Ted and Lester to help her friend and frequent cab driver, Mohammed, who’s being exploited by his immigration lawyer. When Kenzie pays that lawyer an unexpected visit, she finds him dead and winds up a suspect in his murder. As Ted works to clear Kenzie’s name and uncover the real killer, Kenzie becomes the target of a sophisticated smear campaign orchestrated by the man behind the development project—who may have been framing Kenzie from the beginning. Everything that worked in Tower of Babel works just as well here, with sharp characters and noirish atmosphere to spare. This series deserves a long run. Agent: Judith Weber, Sobel Weber Assoc.