The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee

 

One of New York’s great citizens, who presented the idea of Central Park, the MET, the Public Library, was gay—which was a big deal in the nineteenth century. This brilliant murder mystery + history of the city, is easily one of the year’s very best. Read it for the stunning writing, if nothing else. Policemen are “like the lightbulbs hanging in the dreary interview room—bulbous at the hips, narrow at the head, dusty, inadequate, flickering in and out of attention.” Also: “At a certain age we forget to be afraid of people. We start to dread, instead, their absence.” Mind-blowingly good.