Heavy Sugar

The latest from the “poet laureate of Brooklyn” is a zany, foul-mouthed, and tender-hearted screwball noir about a stolen baseball and the lengths people will go to find it. And themselves.

Thanksgiving Eve, 1991: Most things that lovable scoundrel Georgie Quinlan has tried to do in his life have gone horribly wrong: Marriage. Fatherhood. Most recently, an armed robbery. It’s the latter thing that has Georgie on the lam and back in Gravesend, Brooklyn, the sleepy Italian American enclave where he hasn’t shown his face in a decade. He’s stolen a Joe DiMaggio–signed baseball from the old Irish pub, hoping it’s worth a penny, and hoping that southern Brooklyn is the last place anyone will look for him. This, Georgie is wrong about too.

Awaiting Georgie in Gravesend are his wife, Loretta, whom he hasn’t seen in twelve years, and his teenage kid, Roz, who knows nothing about her father—he’s been MIA for most of her life. But Roz is about to get a crash course in Georgie Quinlan. So is everyone, whether they want one or not.

Unfolding over one frenzied day, William Boyle’s latest Brooklyn-set noir is a humorous, no-holds-barred exploration of buried desires and long-simmering resentments, a pulse-pounding, unpredictable bash from a singular voice in crime fiction.