J.I. Jung
Available From Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
“emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.”
-- Kirkus Reviews
DEATH AVENUE
It is Wednesday, October 1, 1919. There’s a dead man in the
middle of Tenth Avenue. It’s 2:00 a.m.
Walk the mean streets of New York with Eddie Rum, He is back from the Great War in Europe and needs to pay his rent. He takes $50 to clear a dead man from Manhattan's notorious "Death Avenue". The stiff is Chinese and nameless and easy to forget. But Eddie can't forget.
This is America under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese must register with the government but somehow remain invisible to the rest of society. Eddie goes in search of the dead man's name.
The search leads from Death Avenue to Chinatown, Harlem nightclubs to Tammany Hall, dive bars that bars the smell of sour beer to gentleman's clubs filled with cigar smoke. What begins with one battered corpse soon draws Eddie into a web of crooked immigration schemes, ruthless land speculators, powerful criminals—and a plot reaching all the way to the 1919 World Series.
Every answer brings Eddie closer to the truth. But the closer he gets to revealing his own secret. He is Chinese American and passing for white, in an America where his very existence is illegal.
"Jung sweeps readers into the mean streets of 1919 New York City in this gritty series debut."
– Publisher's Weekly, BookLife
“As a fast-paced, action-packed novel, this story will appeal to fans of murder mysteries and urban crime set at the dawn of Prohibition.”
—Karen Bordonaro, Historical Novel Society
“The setting is vivid and moody… I often felt like I was watching this story unfold in living black and white.”
—Karen Siddel, Reedsy Discovery
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