Little Odessa

By Joseph Koenig

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, only the very young or very old are allowed to immigrate to the United States. Places like Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach – or, as residents call it, "Little Odessa" – are flooded with teenage strivers eager to shake their accents and take what America has to offer. Kate Piro is as ambitious as they come, but her pluck only gets her as far as Times Square’s Starlight Club, where she dances naked under the stage name M. Anita Supreme. After being assaulted by a drunken Nigerian diplomat, Kate meets a kindly cop who falls hard for the headstrong stripper. He wants to save her – or at least sleep with her – but Kate doesn’t need his help. She’s determined to get out of Brighton Beach, even though every man she meets drags her deeper into a cesspit of sleaze, vice, and murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: mysteriouspress.com
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786698360

Joseph Koenig

Joseph Koenig is an author of hard-boiled fiction. A former crime reporter, he won critical acclaim and an Edgar nomination for his first novel, Floater (1986), a grimly violent story of con men, cops, and killers in the Florida Everglades. His next two novels were Little Odessa (1988), a darkly comic tale of life in New York’s Ukrainian underworld, and Smugglers Notch (1989), a story of brutal murder in snowbound Vermont. Koenig’s fourth novel, the groundbreaking Brides of Blood (1993), won strong reviews for its elegant treatment of police procedure in Islamic Iran. For nearly two decades after Brides of Blood, Koenig did not publish. But in 2012 the pulp-style publishing house Hard Case Crime released his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.

Reviews for Little Odessa

[featherbear · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Witty crime fiction and a snapshot of New York in the 1980s, limited to the world of borderline legal and criminal activity and characters, with some family resemblance to the fiction of Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins. With these models, you can expect the crime leans more toward disorganized, hapless petty criminals; organized crime has no role at all. Despite the title, the Russian enclave in Brighton Beach plays a part, but not a featured role; other places include Times Square, and, further uptown,72nd street, as well as other places in upper and lower Manhattan, Coney Island (including the Typhoon roller coaster), and a mansion in Forest Hills. New York of the period is as grimy as I remember it; wonder if they still make egg creams? Major player is Kate Piro, aka Little Odessa, M. Anita Supreme— thoroughly Americanized Russian-Jewish immigrant (at the age of 9), a topless-bottomless dancer on Times Square, a dog and house-sitter, a belly dancer and temporary manager at the Arabian Knights [sic], Middle Eastern restaurant run by an Israeli who is also a smuggler with a stash. Piro is, eventually, a woman in peril, largely because of the dog, a Russian wolfhound named Isaac Grynzpun. Kate Piro is a surprisingly complex portrait: intelligent, ambitious, and probably the most ethical of the characters (but the bar is set low). On the other hand, she can be infuriatingly irrational and naïve or gullible. A nice role for Mila Kunis if this had a chance of being a movie. Other characters: her boyfriend Nathan Metrevelli, a small time drug dealer looking for another line of work, Stan Bucyk, a very corrupt cop who later becomes a “consultant” for the FBI, Harry Lema, a skillful but unfortunate burglar and dognapper who becomes the novel’s punching bag, Howard Ormont, the Israeli smuggler and dog owner, Mike Nicholas another member of the small world of smuggling, though considerably more elegant, and Paul Infante, a cop on the right side of the law.