It’s May of ’68 in New York City, and twenty-two-year-old Freddie Riley is cycling home from her job as a bike messenger, unaware that her life is about to be upended. She walks into her apartment to find a stranger, lying dead, and her foster mother, Yvette, bleeding out on the floor. Yvette whispers a cryptic message that sets Freddie and her best friend and secret crush, Celia, on the run, careening from gritty old Times Square to the glamorous Cary Grant suite at the Warwick.
Freddie unleashes her considerable street-smarts and ingenuity to keep them one step ahead of their relentless pursuers, with the hope they can solve the mystery of Yvette's murder before they both end up in serious, possibly deadly, trouble.
Race against time alongside a feisty heroine with a kickass attitude through the rough streets of 1968 New York City in a tale where the murder is only the first thread of a secret everyone wants to keep buried forever.
Bink Books
210 pp. ● 6x9
$15.95 (pb) ● $9.99 (eb)
ISBN 978-1-960373-91-5 (pb)
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Amateur Sleuth
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Cozy / General
FICTION / LGBTQ+ / Lesbian
Pub date: July 28, 2026
Naomi Rand is the author of three mysteries featuring divorced criminal investigator, Emma Price, they are The One That Got Away, Stealing For A Living, and It’s Raining Men (all from Harpercollins). She has stories in two great collections, Crime and Music (Three Rooms Press) and Hard Boiled Brooklyn (Bleak House Books). Her fiction and literary criticism has appeared in The Flexible Persona, Other Voices, Melus, Cutbank,The Florida Review, and The North Dakota Quarterly. Her non-fiction has appeared in many national publications including Redbook, Parents, Ladies Home Journal, and The New York Times. For longer than she cares to remember she was a non-fiction book reviewer for The Boston Globe. She is the recipient of a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for her fiction.
Visit Naomi’s website: http://www.naomirand.com