City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Westside, a novel, W. M. Akers

eng

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no index present

fiction

Westside

W. M. Akers

a novel

It's 1921, and a thirteen-mile fence running the length of Broadway splits the island of Manhattan, separating the prosperous Eastside from the Westside, an overgrown wasteland whose hostility to modern technology gives it the flavor of old New York. Thousands have disappeared here, and the respectable have fled, leaving behind the killers, thieves, poets, painters, drunks, and those too poor or desperate to leave. It is a hellish landscape, and Gilda Carr proudly calls it home. Slightly built, but with a will of iron, Gilda follows in the footsteps of her late father, a police detective turned private eye. Unlike that larger-than-life man, Gilda solves tiny mysteries. Mrs. Copeland, a well-to-do Eastside housewife, hires Gilda to find a missing white leather glove before her irascible merchant husband learns it is gone. When Gilda witnesses Mr. Copeland's murder at a Westside pier, she finds herself sinking into a mire of bootlegging, smuggling, corruption and an evil too dark to face. All she wants is to find one dainty ladies' glove. But as she begins to see the connection between his murder, her father's death, and the darkness plaguing the Westside, she faces the hard truth: she must save her city or die with it