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A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York
by Elon Green
The gripping true story, told here for the first time, of the Last Call Killer and the gay community of New York City that he preyed upon.
The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable.
He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that's what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim.
Nor will he be his last.
The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the '80s and '90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten.
This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him. And at the same time, it paints a portrait of his victims and a vibrant community navigating threat and resilience.
Edgar Awards, 2022
A "terrific, harrowing, true-crime account of an elusive serial killer who preyed upon gay men in the 1990s... [Green] provides an adrenalized police-procedural plot without ever losing sight of the fact that these were innocent human beings who were duped, butchered and discarded."
- The New York Times (Editor's Pick)
"In this astonishing and powerful work of nonfiction, Green meticulously reports on a series of baffling and brutal crimes targeting gay men. It is an investigation filled with twists and turns, but this is much more than a compelling true crime story. Green has shed light on those whose lives for too long have been forgotten, and rescued an important part of American history."
- David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon
"Last Call is not only a great book, nor a mere historical correction. It is an act of compassion..."
- The Boston Globe
"Last Call is both a riveting whodunnit and a broad cultural history of the times."
- People
"[In true crime], the killers often become the focus, the object of fascination. This is not true in Last Call, which puts the victims first, and which, when it does reveal the discovery of the killer, doesn't attempt to make him seem like an anti-hero."
- NPR
"These crimes have been covered before, but Green sets his work apart by offering nuanced portraits of the victims and exploring how they navigated lives that led them to the bars that might have seemed like safe spaces but turned out to be anything but. ...Reflecting both its author's compassion and journalistic chops, this gripping narrative also focuses on forensic innovation and jurisdictional intrigue. A stellar tale of justice eluded, to add to the growing queer true crime genre."
- Library Journal, starred review
"Departing from the tendency of the true-crime genre to centre on the killers, Mr. Green focuses on the victims in all their complexity. This is no easy feat."
- The Economist
This information about Last Call was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elon Green is the author of Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. His work appears in the true crime anthology Unspeakable Acts.
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