Though I write for this West Coast newspaper, I live in New York City. That means, like a lot of dwellers of the five boroughs, I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about real estate, whether griping about too-high rents for tiny apartments or the erection of another steel-heavy skyscraper in my neighborhood. Walking underneath scaffolding, zigzagging through hastily constructed passageways and watching the work of those awe-inspiring cranes brings to mind other salient points about the making of buildings: construction delays, unfortunate accidents and financial mismanagement. And all of those ingredients seem a natural for mysteries and thrillers.
Indeed, the inner workings of real estate deals provide juicy plot points for many a crime novel, but somehow writers seem to shy away from making this business their primary focus — or readers don't gravitate toward this particular professional subject. Chevy Stevens' acclaimed new thriller "Still Missing" (St. Martin's: 364 pp., $25) features a real estate agent, but her psychologically ravaged heroine could have had any career, so long as it provided the necessary pretext for peril.
S.J. Rozan's underrated 2007 standalone novel "In This Rain" (Delta: 380 pp., $15 paper) did a terrific job delineating the staggering pressure to build a multi-million-dollar tower and the shortcuts and bribes required to make such an endeavor happen. But that book seemed to be the exception to the rule that real estate was a subject best left alone because its complexity wasn't terribly reader-friendly.
Another entry into the miniscule "real estate noir" category, however, might stand the best chance of opening up this wonderfully byzantine world to a larger audience, largely because the author frames this world in the context of other career paths well-familiar to the crime fiction reader: lawyers, journalists, and cops. "Blind Man's Alley" (Doubleday: 470 pp., $25.95) dives into the skulduggery of commercial real estate dealings with enthusiastic gusto, but it's filtered through Peacock's larger concern about the moral struggles of a cynical young associate who may not have severed the cord of idealism in the pursuit of money.
