HARLEM AFTER MIDNIGHT

Disembarking from the Queen Mary after a trans-Atlantic tango with murder, a mixed-race British singer finds more of the same in 1936 New York.

When the Broadway gig Lena Aldridge has been promised vanishes upon her arrival, she’s left with no prospects and little cash on hand. Luckily, Will Goodman, the bandleader she took up with on the crossing, gets her settled with his old friends Claudette and Louis Linfield, a librarian and pediatrician who welcome her into their home with bountiful hospitality. In the absence of steady work, Lena resolves to find out why her father, pianist Alfie Aldridge, left New York to return to London and what became of his sister, Jessie, who’s mysteriously vanished. Nor are these the only family ties that keep Lena awake at night, for she doesn’t know quite what to make of bartender Bel Bennett, Will’s half sister, who seems determined to befriend her, and she has an unexpected and unwelcome encounter with Eliza Abernathy, the birth mother from whom she’s long been estranged. Hare, who begins her story with a police officer’s discovery of a woman on the point of death after falling or being pushed from a window of the Linfields’ third-floor apartment, shuttles back and forth between present-day 1936 and 1908, shortly before Alfie left New York for reasons Lena will be both satisfied and shocked to discover.

Most notable for its keenly observed portrait of the intricately layered Black society that flourishes in Harlem.