Reggie Nadelson is the author of nine hugely successful novels featuring Artie Cohen, which have been translated into many languages, including French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Thai and Polish.

Synopsis

Mid-December 2008. Barack Obama has just been elected; all New York is ecstatic, especially Harlem. On a freezing night a few weeks later, detective Artie Cohen gets a late call from his ex girlfriend, Lily Hanes, begging for his help. Lily has been living at the Louis Armstrong Apartments, one of Harlem's great buildings, while working on Obama's campaign; now her Russian neighbor, Marianna Simonova, has died, and Lily fears she's at fault and needs Artie's Russian connections. Over a weekend when the city is locked in by snow and cold, with the financial markets tanking, one after another people at the Armstrong die. Artie, out of his element, a white detective in a black world, is drawn inexorably into the realm of Sugar Hill and the Armstrong, where almost everybody except for the real estate developers seems locked in the past…

Reggie Nadelson has a real feel for the sources of life in the New York neighborhoods she celebrates in her vibrant mysteries featuring Artie Cohen, a Russian-born detective who knows the city with the intimacy of a lover. Nadelson sends Artie to Harlem in BLOOD COUNT (Walker, $26), initially to feel the pulse of the district on the night Barack Obama is elected president, and later to help a friend cope with the suspicious death of an old Russian woman at the Louis Armstrong Apartments in Sugar Hill.
This grand old building, perpetually besieged by opportunistic developers, is more than an attractive murder setting. It’s also a stage where the elderly residents can regale Artie with wonderful accounts of legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Strayhorn. Even the stories that lack a pivotal function in the plot, like the reverential one about Paul Robeson, contribute to the broader message: that some neighborhoods can always find hope in a dream. –

Marilyn Stasio NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

LONDONGRAD

On the wilder fringes of New York, where planes thunder low over the Jamaica wetlands, a child's swing turns gently in the breeze, on it, the multilated body of a beautiful girl bound in a glistering shroud of silver duct tape. At first, it seems to be a random killing, but death is stalking those close to Artie Cohen and all too soon he finds himself stumbling into tragedy and terror. The cynical corruption of the new cold war stretches from the dazzling clubs of Russian Brooklyn, to 'Londongrad' - where hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants, rich and poor, elegant and ruthless, have created a shimmering, seething, sqaulid underworld in the heart of the British capital, then on to Putin's Moscow where corruption and business still stroll hand in hand and human life is worth only what someone is willing to pay.

 

‘It's rare that crime writing should so passionately and precisely examine its own time. Its also reassuring to find a writer who is so magnificently up to the job.'
Literary Review

'Artie Cohen is one of crime fiction's most deeply and sensitively drawn cops... This is intelligent crime-writing impregnated with acute social observation.'
The Times

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The Archipelago Trilogy

DISTURBED EARTH

Although this was the fourth book in the series, it was with Disturbed Earth that Artie really gets a sense of the city he loves. As he realizes that New York is an archipelago, a city state floating on water, more than ever, he resolves that this is where he belongs, that this is where what family he has are, and here is the community of cops and friends that matters most of all. Disturbed Earth takes place in the wake of 9/11, when the city feels nothing is in place, that the tectonic plates have shift, and people think only about the hole in the middle of the city and the gap in the skyline. Like missing teeth, everyone says.
A child’s clothes turns up on a stretch of waste ground near Coney Island, and because the jogger who finds them is Russian, Artie is called in on the case. (Read More)

 

 

RED HOOK

At the beginning of RED HOOK, Artie seems to have recovered from the horrors of finding the truth about his nephew Billy.  As the book opens, he is celebrating his marriage to Maxine Crabbe at the party given by Tolya Sverdloff at his loft in the meat packing district. But Artie is called away to Red Hook where a body has been found.
Sid McKay, a famous retired journalist has found a body on the waterfront near his loft. He has called Artie, and while Artie tries to find out what’s going on, Sid himself is murdered. There follows the unraveling of too many lives. Caught up in this is Valentina Sverdloff, Tolya’s beloved daughter. Before the end of the book, there will be more murders and more revelations some about the lies journalists tell in covering up stories, some about Sid McKay’s strange past. (Read More)

 

FRESH KILLS

In Fresh Kills, Artie has to take custody of Billy Farone, his nephew who was sent to a facility in Florida for killing a man (in Disturbed Earth). Billy comes home for two weeks to stay with Artie and in the course of this time, Artie finds himself with a case on Staten Island. This is the most suburban, oddest of all the New York boroughs, a place where Tony Soprano like Mafiosi have their mansions, where new immigrants look for small bungalows to settle down in and where the huge garbage dump, Fresh Kills, sends up clouds of methane gas.
And in the midst of it all, as Artie tries to adjust to married life with Maxine Crabbe and her daughters, Lily Hanes shows up.
Here Artie must come to terms with the truth about Billy, and about himself. (read more)