New York City. October 1919. A man is dead on the tracks of Tenth Avenue.

He doesn't have a wallet. Doesn't have a name anyone was willing to say out loud. Just a notebook stuffed with secrets and an address buried inside it that leads straight into the heart of Chinatown.

 

Eddie Rum moves the body. It pays fifty dollars. He thinks that is where it ends. It does not.

 

Eddie has one rule he lives by above all others: nobody finds out who he really is. To the white men at the Oriental Club, he is just another tough guy. To the cops, he is invisible. To the powerful Tong bosses of Chinatown, he is a ghost who left a long time ago and should not have come back. To the law of the United States of America, he is one moment of bad luck away from a prison cell. Or worse, deportation to a country he has never set foot in.

 

Because Eddie Rum is Chinese American. Half white, half Chinese, passing for white in a city that has no legal place for someone like him. The Chinese Exclusion Act does not care how American he feels. And 1919 New York doesn't like gray areas.

 

But when Eddie starts pulling on the threads of the dead man's life, he is drawn closer to conspiracy of greed that runs from the tunnels beneath Chinatown to the greatest scandal in America's pastime. 

 

And the closer he gets to the truth, the more his own secret is at risk.

 

Death Avenue is hardboiled noir with a real pulse. Fast, sharp, and impossible to put down but underneath the action is something that hits harder: the story of a man who has to hide half of himself just to stay alive. Set against Prohibition on the horizon, the steam and noise of the Manhattan railroad, and the weight of a law designed to erase an entire people, J.I. Jung's debut introduces a detective unlike any you have read before.

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“emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.” -- Kirkus Reviews

"What a fantastic book!" –  Karen Siddall, Reedsy Discovery

 

For readers of Walter Mosley, Dashiell Hammett, and S.J. Rozan