LOVE THE STRANGER

Ready for a walk on the seamy side of contemporary New York social policy? Sears has your number, and everyone else’s.

Life’s not easy for Haidir Khalil. Even though his mother has finally won American citizenship, he’s afraid of getting caught up in an ICE dragnet, losing his job at Manny Singh’s Fruit & Produce, and getting shipped back to Yemen at 14. Nor is life easy for Haidir’s stepfather, Mohammed Al Fazal Mahdi, who owes more than $40,000 to immigration lawyer Howard Spitzer, who has yet to produce any significant development in a case that should be routine. And when you come to think of it, life’s not even easy for Stop the Spike activist McKenzie Zielinski and Ted Molloy, her live-in lawyer, who employ Mahdi as a driver. They share a cramped apartment, spend every waking hour trying to keep greedy developers like Ron Reisner from expanding their empires further at tremendous cost to the locals and their city, are subject to abduction by unsatisfied mob bosses’ henchmen, and struggle to counter the false news stories that are spread about them after Kenzie finds Spitzer dead in his office, and Det. Duran of the NYPD takes a serious interest in her. Ignoring the obvious motives of Bruce Hillyer, Spitzer’s partner—whose wife was having an affair with Spitzer—Duran loses his interest in pinning the murder on Kenzie only when he decides that the figure she glimpsed fleeing Spitzer’s office was actually Haidir. On the way to unmasking an anticlimactic perp, Sears finds dirt on every bite of the Big Apple.

Though the protagonists survive more or less intact, there’s bound to be steady work awaiting them next time.