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 Redemption Street
released by Busted Flush Press, Dec. 2007
released by Viking in 2004
It's 1981. Ex NYC cop Moe Prager's comfortable new life is turned on its ear when he is hired to investigate an old fire at a Borscht Belt hotel. The 1966 fire took the lives of 17 people, mostly kids up from the city working in the mountains for the summer. As fate would have it,  two of the teenage girls who perished in the fire had been Moe's high school classmates. One of the dead girls, Andrea Cotter, had been the object of Moe's adolescent affections.
Follow Moe Prager as he traverses a minefield of charred bodies, scarred lives, ambitious politicians and corrupt cops. Was the fire really caused by some fool smoking in bed or was it arson? Will the long dead keep their secrets or will they rise up to help Moe Prager uncover the truth? Will the truth lead down a blind alley or to the bright lights on Redemption Street?
Coleman's fast-paced sequel to Walking the Perfect Square will please fans of both hard-boiled and traditional mysteries...
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Blurbs
EDGAR AWARD WINNERS ON REDEMPTION STREET
"Reed Farrel Coleman makes claim to a unique corner of the private detective
genre with Redemption Street. With great poignancy and passion he constructs a
tale that fittingly underlines how we are all captives of the past. Moe Prager
is my kind of private eye."
-Michael Connelly,
author of Lost Light
"Moe Prager is the thinking man's PI. He's a reluctant but dogged investigator, a family man even when the family's irritating (or worse), and a straight-ahead ex-cop willing to spend some mental energy on questions of loyalty, love, and religion. The case he works in Redemption Street is sad, tangled, and fascinating, and his company is a pleasure."
-SJ Rozan,
author of Winter and Night
"Reed Farrel Coleman goes right to the darkest corners of the human heart-to the obsessions, the tragedies, the buried secrets from the past. Through it all he maintains such a pure humanity in Moe Prager-the character is as alive to me as an old friend. I flat out loved the first Prager book, but somehow he's made this one even better."
-Steve Hamilton,
author of Blood Is the Sky
"Moe Prager is a family man who can find the humanity in almost everyone he meets; he is a far from perfect hero, but an utterly appealing one. Let's hope that his soft heart and lively mind continue to lure him out of his wine shop for many, many more cases."
-Laura Lippman,
author of The Sugar House
Reviews
The Strand Magazine
Redemption Street is the second Moe Prager mystery by Reed Farrel
Coleman, following his debut with Walking the Perfect Square. I got
interested in these books because of an ad in Issue XII of The Strand
Magazine and I’m very glad I did, as both books are excellent, moving
mysteries. Readers will be able to enjoy Redemption Street without
having read Walking the Perfect Square (in which Moe meets his wife
while working on the disappearance of her younger brother) because
Coleman provides enough background information to get them up to speed,
although they should be warned that in the process he also reveals some
of the surprises and twists of the earlier book. For those who wish to
read the earlier novel, it has just come out in paperback.
Moe (Moses) Prager is a Jewish former New York City uniform cop whose
greatest achievement while on the force was finding a missing child for
whom the whole city had been looking. He left the force when he ruined
his knee slipping on carbon paper on the station house floor, and
subsequently began running a successful wine store with his older
brother Aaron.
The book is set in 1981 and Coleman adds many humorous nostalgic
touches, such as Moe scoffing at new innovations such as fax machines
that he is sure will not last. Arthur Rosen, obviously mentally
disturbed, comes to Moe’s wine shop wanting him to investigate the death
of his sister Karen. She had died years before in a fire at a hotel in
the Catskills along with several others from Lincoln High School -- a
school Moe had also attended.
Then R.B. Carter (aka Rudy Cotter), a big real estate dealer whose
sister Andrea also perished in the fire, tries to bribe Moe not to take
the case in order to spare his parents from having his sister’s death
brought up again. Moe (who had been in love from afar with Andrea)
refuses the bribe but assures Carter he will not take the case. When he
goes to see Arthur Rosen to apologize for treating him roughly, he finds
that Rosen has killed himself. Feeling responsible for sending Rosen
over the edge, he changes his mind and decides to investigate.
Most of the book takes place in the Catskills near the town of Old
Rotterdam, a totally depressed area filled with the shells of once
popular resort hotels. As one who grew up in New York City during the
fifties and spent several vacations in the "mountains," I have to say
that Coleman’s details about the history of the Catskills and his
description of the area circa 1981 struck home, hitting just the right
pitch. While investigating, Moe constantly runs into intriguing
characters, including an aged Borscht Belt comedian now running a
failing hotel, aged Floridians returning to the Catskills for one last
vacation, neo-Nazis, Hasidim, and a group referring to themselves as
"Proud Jews." In addition to investigating the fire that killed Karen
Rosen, Andrea Cotter, and fifteen others, Moe also examines his own past
and his current relationships.
Redemption Street is a consistently interesting and surprising novel.
Every time Moe and the reader think they have everything figured out,
Coleman throws in another little twist or surprise. In addition to
writing an excellent mystery, Coleman makes Moe Prager a consistently
interesting narrator. During the course of this investigation, Moe
begins to question his own past and his faith—as both a secular and a
religious Jew. Moe’s relationships with his wife, brother, and
father-in-law are as intriguing as the mystery itself. This series comes
highly recommended. I eagerly await further investigations by Moe
Prager.
—Martin Friedenthal
ThisWeekNews
Optimistically, you maybe find room to review about 50 releases a year ... barely scratching the surface of the books that come out in a single month. Consequently, many fine books get by you on their first round.
So is the case with Redemption Street (Viking, 244 pages, $22.95) by New York crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman. The second installment in the "Moe Prager" series was released earlier this year.
Prager is an ex-cop who never rose in the ranks to detective. He had one headline-snatching case before sustaining an injury that cashiered him out of the force. He has an underutilized P.I. license and runs a successful wine shop in New York with his brother. His stomping grounds are Brooklyn ... Coney Island and the rickety remains of the Wonder Wheel.
Coleman sets Redemption Street in 1981: Fax machines are a dubious novelty ... DNA is just creeping into potentiality in the field of forensics. Reluctantly, Prager is drawn into the investigation of the long-ago death of a former high school crush.
Andrea Cotter died with more than a dozen others in a 1965 fire in a hotel where she was working as a waitress in the Catskills ... an ill-fated summer job:
"The workers' quarters went up like a Roman candle. The building was already collapsing by the time the volunteer fire departments arrived on the scene. ... Unfortunately, most of the dead ... got the worst and least accessible accommodations. It was a rite of passage, I remembered the hotel manager saying. The new staff suffered their first year. For them there would be no better beds the second year. No second year at all."
Prager sets off for the dying resort area and the dilapidated, near ghost town of the Borscht Belt to investigate the decades-old crime.
What he finds are never-arrived Jewish comics turned struggling hotel operators, compromised politicians, corrupt cops and some seriously committed anti-Semites.
Although Moe has never been a devout Jew, after several days of threats and racial slurs spray-painted on -- or burned into -- the hood of his car, he is forced to re-evaluate his own racial identity.
Coleman has a gift for building atmosphere and sketching compelling, fully realized characters. His depiction of the dying Catskill resort towns is compelling.
His investigator is also striking for his grounded, pragmatic personality. Moe's a family man -- a committed husband and father ... a guy who hasn't strayed far from the old neighborhood. And he has a strong impulse for nostalgia -- a good quality in a novel in which the past has its hooks so strongly, and destructively, on the (early-1980s) present.
As a December read, Redemption Street takes on a bit of extra nuance, set as it is in late November and early December, when the Catskills are snowbound.
This is also a particularly good time to catch up on Prager and this very promising young series:
January 2005 will see the release of the third installment in the Moe Prager series, The James Deans. That novel is also set in the early 1980s, and the story is said to be based loosely on the Chandra Levy case.
Moe Prager offers a unique and fresh spin on the old-school P.I. novel, and Coleman is a crime writer to watch.
-Craig McDonald
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