J.I. Jung
Available From Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
DEATH AVENUE
“emotionally powerful and unburdened by cheap sentimentality.”
-- Kirkus Reviews
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, a tight-lipped tough guy who has just returned from the Great War in Europe. He needs to pay his rent and 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 let it go because Eddie Rum is Chinese, and passing for white.
This is America under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese can't vote, must register with the government, and are restricted to the jobs they work and even the people they can marry. Eddie Rum is the son of a Chinese father and a white mother, if this secret is exposed he faces arrest and deportation to a country he has never seen.
The search for the dead man's name leads from Death Avenue to Chinatown, Harlem nightclubs to Tammany Hall, dive bars that stink 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 to fix the 1919 World Series.
Every answer brings Eddie closer to the truth, but there is also the risk of revealing his unique and illegal identity..
"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
Available From Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
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