Onion Street: A Moe Prager Mystery
By Reed Farrel Coleman
Coleman’s book, the eighth in his Moe Prager series, came out in May, but if you missed it then, it’s worth tracking down because it’ll make for very entertaining company on the beach before the summer slips away. A commercial truck driver by day (really), Coleman caught the crime-fiction writing bug after taking a night-school class in the genre at Brooklyn College. Since then, he’s written 15 novels, loads of short fiction, and some poetry, while also serving as executive VP of Mystery Writers of America, and being dubbed the “noir poet laureate” by the Huffington Post. The Prager books are set in Coney Island and their title character is a savvy ex-cop turned PI with “a New York Jewish, part-yuppie, part blue-collar, insider-outsider sensibility,” as NPR put it in 2009.