An Honest Living

A Novel

By: Dwyer Murphy

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

• A Best Book of the Year from The New Yorker, LitHub, CrimeReads, and more!

A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers.

Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

The beginning of the story was very engaging and the reading had a great tone and pace.

The story has a very anticlimactic ending, however the reading was very good. Would recommend this reader maybe not the author.

A True Noir

There’s a disaffected narrator, a damsel in distress who may or may not have a secret, a crime (or two), enough dry observations to make you reach for a cool drink, and even a fat man. Beautifully read.

Dud

writing style great, performance great, story overall flat and lacking...just kept thinking there had to be more

Great writing!

modern noir! Full of city metaphor. Catch’s the smells and brings them to the readers nose.

A noir homage. Or maybe pastiche. You decide.

I picked it up on a whim. I like noir. But this... it was something else. An homage. Or maybe a pastiche. To be honest, it was hard to say. I'm all for mystery, but it starts to get tedious. Maybe this was a book where nothing happens and people are just talking all the time going off into the woods. Is it Chinatown? Or maybe some Conrad story we're stuck in. Who knows? I wasn't sure I was following the story. Not sure I wanted to know. It was a long story that hung together pretty loosely. The man's confession was wrapped in his own skin. There was a great deal more to the story but I couldn't remember all the details. I needed a drink. Deserved one for finishing. Didn't we all?