Westside

Set in an alternate 1920s Manhattan where a 13-mile fence divides the thriving Eastside from a nightmarish Westside, Akers’s highly entertaining debut introduces Gilda Carr, a street-savvy PI. A Westsider, Gilda specializes in solving “tiny mysteries,” but her search for a woman’s missing glove leads her straight into the center of a looming war and offers up clues that could resolve such troubling issues as what magic is turning the Westside into a living hell, where thousands of people have disappeared and landscapes change overnight, and what happened to her father, a legendary gang leader turned cop who vanished years earlier. A cast of meticulously developed and memorable characters as well as strong worldbuilding and atmospherics more than compensate for the sometimes flimsy supernatural thread. Memorable prose is a plus (“The white lights of Broadway shimmered through the gin like gasoline in gutter water”). Fans of genre-bending fiction will relish this inventive mix of mystery and the paranormal. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (May)