Hudson’s Kill is a historical thriller set in New York City in 1803. The title of this action-packed sequel to the widely praised Devil’s Half Mile is a play on words. A “kill” in New York history meant a stream or watercourse, from the Dutch spoken by early settlers. (It remains in many regional place names.) Of course, to kill also means to murder. The rapidly growing city is a bubbling ferment of political and financial schemes, where rival gangs, free blacks and slaves, destitute immigrants, and wealthy property owners all jockey for power and influence. A special commission is deciding how to shape the city’s future; anyone with advance knowledge of the plan stands to make a fortune. Crime and prostitution are rampant, and there’s no formal police force—just a handful of city marshals and a mostly volunteer night watch.
In such a volatile environment, biracial schoolteacher Kerry O’Toole’s discovery of a viciously murdered, dark-skinned young girl sets off more than an ordinary criminal investigation. Her friend, City Marshal Justice Flanagan, an Irish immigrant, is determined to find out the girl’s identity and bring the killer to account despite limited resources and the seeming indifference of his chief. No one comes forward to claim the victim’s body, and Justy’s investigation soon ensnares him in a convoluted maze of public violence and secret depravity that reaches from the lowest to the highest elements of society, from Wall Street to the swampy fringes where the filthy stream called Hudson’s Kill will one day become Canal Street. There are hints of romantic attraction between Justy and Kerry, who is conducting her own, increasingly risky undercover investigation.
Hudson’s Kill reads like a fast-paced action movie with plentiful, surprising twists and turns. One dramatic event follows another with hardly a pause. Violent confrontations are vividly depicted, blow-by-blow, in sometimes gruesome detail. Colorful characters abound and authentic period slang, or “flash talk,” lends an air of realism to the vibrant dialogue that is occasionally undercut by the use of more modern expressions such as “you know the drill.” The issues of political corruption, financial speculation, race relations, gender roles, and human trafficking, however, are as real now as they were more than two centuries ago. The entertaining narrative sweeps the reader along, grounding sometimes far-fetched plot elements in gritty detail.
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