Dope - Softcover

Gran, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843544822 ISBN 13: 9781843544821

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2006

Synopsis

It is 1950s New York and heroin has flooded the streets. Josephine Flannigan sure has picked a dumb time to give it up. Now, she's reduced to boosting jewellery to get by. So, when she's offered a thousand bucks to find Nadine, a good girl turned dope fiend, she's more than happy to give it a go. As Josephine spirals through a cast of streetwalkers and conmen in dive bars and fleapit hotels, it becomes clear that the world she thinks she knows so well is about to turn round and bite her.

A pitch-black mystery. ("Washington Post")

Tight and polished and exquisitely crafted. (Robert B. Parker)

An oddly elegiac tour of the good-old, bad-old days. ("New York Times Book Review")

One of the meanest, grittiest hard-boiled crime stories ever written... (Associated Press)

[A] pitch-black mystery. ("Washington Post")

Totally shocking. ("Times Picayune")

Nicely twisted. ("Chicago Sun-Times")

Triple-axel plot twists...nearly every page has surprises. ("Los Angeles Times")

[An] oddly elegiac tour of the good-old, bad-old days. (New York Times Book Review)

[A] pitch-black mystery. (Washington Post)

About this title

About the Author

Sara Gran is the author of the acclaimed novel Come Closer, which has been translated into nine languages.

From Publishers Weekly

After her well-received horror tale Come Closer, you can't blame Gran for trying her hand at a 1950s noir, but her turns on stripped-down conventions are less sharp this time out. Gran's heroine, Josephine "Joe" Flannigan, is a former heroin addict and hooker who has recast herself as a petty thief and con. Working her home turf, New York City's Hell's Kitchen, she is taken up by a mysterious well-to-do couple offering her $1,000 up front and another $1,000 on delivery to find their addict daughter, expelled from Barnard and lost to the streets. The reader never actually sees Joe do any thieving or conning, because she's got that $1,000 to ride on. Instead, Joe's search for the missing coed takes her on a cliché-ridden tour of the bare apartments and public parks frequented by the junkies who used to be her friends. (And it's the '50s, so teenagers listen to 45s, and black Chevrolets are still cool.) Joe's troubled relationship with little sister Shelley is a very engaging conflict, but Gran doesn't bring them together often enough. It never occurs to Joe that she may be being conned herself, and her hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold routine wears thin, but she's easy to root for. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843544822
• ISBN 13: 9781843544821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256