Love the Stranger

Ted Molloy, a Queens attorney with a troublesome penchant for noble causes, investigates the murder of a corrupt immigration lawyer in the sharply observed follow-up to the 2022 Nero Award winner Tower of Babel.

Ted Molloy—a Queens attorney with a troublesome penchant for noble causes—has hit his stride with a foreclosure investment scheme that brings him into contact with a cast of shady characters across New York’s most diverse borough, from Hollis to Howard Beach. On the side, he helps his activist girlfriend, Kenzie, with her work to halt construction on “the Spike”—a corporate-backed development project in Corona that would displace the largely immigrant communities surrounding it.

Stop the Spike is heating up: Kenzie spends most of her waking hours fending off smear campaigns and touring community spaces in Queens to spread the word, which she can do thanks to Mohammed, Ted and Kenzie’s close friend, a recent Yemeni immigrant and most expedient cab driver. But when Kenzie learns that Mohammed’s immigration lawyer may be taking advantage of him financially, she decides to snoop around at the law offices—and comes face to face with a dead body and a shadowy figure fleeing the scene. Now Kenzie is the sole witness to a potential murder. Can Ted and his team get to the bottom of the murder so they can stop the Spike once and for all?

Praise for Love the Stranger

“Michael Sears’s sense of character and place is utterly absorbing; he provides a dark tapestry of city voices and sounds. The plot barrels forward like an express train. Love the Stranger is a thrilling and vital New York City crime novel.”
—William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street, City of Margins, and Gravesend

“In Love the Stranger, Michael Sears has conjured this decade’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Instead of Manhattan, it’s an outer borough where grassroots activists clash with deadly forces and where immigrants—America’s strangers—are the collateral damage, exposing the underbelly of the American Dream. A triumph.”
—Tom Straw, author of The Accidental Joe