Westside by W. M. Akers

Harper Voyager, 304 pages, $22.99

W. M. Akers presents a version of 1921 Manhattan's Westside that is mostly nightmare. The map at the beginning of the book shows a Manhattan demarcated north-south by “The Borderline,” i.e., Broadway, and east-west by “The Fence,” i.e., Fourteenth Street east to Broadway. The wrought-iron Fence is guarded by cops. The Borderline protected by fires and gangs. The lower Westside is neatly cordoned off. But why?

Our hero, Gilda Carr, lives on that imprisoned Westside. It’s a place governed by the smells of wild and rotten things, of mossy carpet covering the streets, of a cataract falling from an abandoned tenenment, of a stream flowing where a street once stood, of menacing night shadows. The Westside is a place where modern-day artifacts do not work. Appliances, including guns, rust and fall apart. Food doesn’t last long, succumbing to mold and decay. I was strongly reminded of the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. As in that series, the world of the Westside is returning to the wild and untamed, with a mysterious source of danger added to the mix.

Gilda is a twenty-eight-year-old detective of “tiny mysteries.” She has been traumatized by the death of her mother, the disappearance of her revered police detective father, Virgil, and the strangeness surrounding her. She really doesn’t want to solve big mysteries, but big mysteries find her. It begins in a tiny way.

Edith, wife of successful businessman Galen Copeland, has lost a glove. It is a very fine, thin leather glove, with a strange insignia. It is right up Gilda’s alley. She is hired by the Eastside Edith because she (naughty, naughty) had ventured to the Westside and lost it there, although that doesn’t come out until much later. Mea culpa for the spoiler. The point is Gilda takes it because the case seems easy. Check around on the Eastside — which she has a permit to visit from her home on the Westside — rummage around a few lost-and-founds, and ta-dah, case closed, money earned.

Because Edith has not played straight with her, Gilda cannot find the glove. She resorts to following Galen Copeland and uncovers some strangeness there. The strangeness multiplies when she learns of connections to other “dignitaries” of the trifurcated Manhattan. Van Alen holds the Upper Westside, Barbarossa the Westside hootch trade and underworld, Aiken (the “city’s foremost fight-promoting, jazz-loving, gin-swilling, white-shoed gangster”) and the cops of the fourth precinct  are settled on the Eastside. And where would 1921 Manhattan be without gangs? They have colorful names like One-Eyed Cats, Swamp Angels, West Fourth Particulars, and the Dead Barrow Toughs. (Oh, there’s a mayor somewhere. We never meet him/her. Doesn’t matter.) 

This story is about the darkness, anger, and greed of this Bizarro-world Manhattan.

Over the last two decades, thousands of “citizens” have disappeared from Manhattan’s streets, mostly from the Westside, and the number disappearing each year is growing larger. Worse, they haven't simply disappeared; they have vanished. Turn away and when you turn back, a loved one or a stranger is suddenly gone. A lot of the vanished are children. Gilda has lost many friends to the spreading horror. And dead-and-gone Virgil Carr is somehow involved. Before he died, he claimed he had solved the mystery, the greatest mystery of his life. And then he, too, disappeared. By then he was a disreputable, discredited drunk. Gone was the vaunted police detective who caught the villains and solved the crimes. No one in the end gave credence to his babblings. But now Gilda must find out if her father knew the truth of what was happening.

Gilda is small and tenacious. She appears to exist without sleep or food or water. Author Akers has created a debauched, decrepit, delinquent Manhattan. It is original on many levels (despite my being reminded of the Southern Reach books and film “The Warriors”). It is agony to watch Gilda get beaten up, set afire, shot at, and have her heart broken. This is one of those books gasping to be set up by the visuals of a movie -- including how people miraculously are uninjured after what would kill the rest of us. So, the book was entertaining, even though it did a lot of back-and-forthing, as I call it — go here, go there, go somewhere else, go back to the first place — which I don’t like in general. However, Akers used the tramping around to highlight different visuals of the island. It’s as if he were saying, if you know Manhattan, then you will appreciate this, and this, and this. He’s certainly allowed.