"Love the Stranger" By Michael Sears: Review/Giveaway

Review by KG Whitehurst

Michael Sears spent over twenty years on Wall Street working in foreign exchange, derivatives, and in the bond market. Obtaining an MBA from Columbia, he rose to become a managing director at Payne Webber and then Jeffries & Company. In 2005, he left the opaque world of high finance to write full time. He tends to concentrate on financial shenanigans and gray areas, which he makes clear with lucid, award-winning prose. Both his Jason Stafford novels have either won or been nominated for major mystery awards: Black Fridays, a financial thriller, won the Shamus and was nominated for the Edgar; Mortal Bonds won the Silver Falchion at Killer Nashville. The first in his new Queens series, Tower of Babel, won the Nero Award in 2022.

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Ted Molloy is a once-and-future real estate attorney in Queens who has more than enough experience with the high-priced and high-powered world of commercial real estate to be a thorn in the sides of both developers and powerful law firms. He also has a penchant for tilting at windmills with anything from the law itself to literal baseball bats. (Did I mention Ted is a Mets fan?) That is particularly true if he’s pointed at a windmill by his activist girlfriend, McKenzie Zielinski, whose coalition Stop the Spike aims to halt construction of an enormous tower block in the Corona neighborhood in Queens. (Sears’ Queens novels are so borough-specific Manhattan is a foreign country.)

Now, the Spike isn’t a particular eyesore, tho’ there’s little to recommend it architecturally, but it will break up the largely immigrant community in Corona, driving out residents and killing small, local businesses. (You will find the story of the underhanded and ultimately violent methods employed by Ron Reisner, the Trumpesque developer in Tower of Babel, which one would do well to read before Love the Stranger. That novel will also introduce you to all the major characters.)

While Reisner continues to plague Kenzie and Stop the Spike with internal espionage and viral deepfakes, it’s her decision to investigate the immigration lawyer hired by her favorite Uber driver, a Yemeni immigrant named Mohammad, that brings her, and thus Ted, into a confrontation with both the broken immigration system and the sleazy lawyer, Howard Spitzer, who isn’t merely cheating Mohammad, but everybody else, too.

When Kenzie finds Spitzer’s dead body and barely sees a young man, possibly a teen, flee the scene, she worries it’s Mohammed’s stepson. And yeah, the NYPD have the kid in the frame for the murder—even tho’ half of Queens wanted Spitzer dead, and the NYPD have another illegal immigrant with a warrant from Texas for several violent crimes in their crosshairs.

While Ron Reisner represents the eternal corruption of real estate development, in or out of New York City, he sits a looming spider in Love the Stranger. His story likely won’t be resolved until the third book in the Queens series, due out in 2026.

The immigration issues form the real core of this novel. They stem from a broken system that is underfunded and understaffed, and that is treated with contempt and disdain. The novel examines how easy it is to scam the immigrants in such a system; however, it suffers from its own topicality. When Sears conceived and wrote this novel, ICE was not yet a full-blown monster. The novel opens with people running from ICE, but the pages don’t explode with terror as they would right now. The ending feels anti-climactic and unsatisfactory because the paralyzing fear of today’s system isn’t present. Current events have overtaken and overshadowed Love the Stranger, which is unfortunate because it’s a fine novel, even if one does wonder what Ted Molloy sees in Kenzie Zielinski.

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K.G. Whitehurst holds a PhD in British history from the University of Virginia. K.G. has blogged about historical fiction at DIYMFA.com; she writes both historical and science fiction mysteries. She lives with her husband, three cats, and over 100 houseplants in Frederick, Maryland, USA.

Disclosure: This post contains links to an affiliate program, for which we receive a few cents if you make purchases. KRL also receives free copies of most of the books that it reviews, that are provided in exchange for an honest review of the book.