Motherless Brooklyn

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - A complusively readable riff on the classic detective novel from America's most inventive novelist. 'A half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette's syndrome.... The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.... Unexpectedly moving.' --The Boston Globe Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel's colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim's widow