The New York City You Don’t See

This is the city tourists don’t see and most New Yorkers – the ones with jobs, the ones with money, the ones who own homes – don’t even know about. It’s the city where the hookers and pimps and strippers live and survive, where the predators exist and prey on the rest of us and on each other, the city where violence is commonplace and nearly always present. It’s midtown Manhattan where visitors come to see shows and eat in fancy restaurants and sleep in expensive hotels but it’s also where the furnished rooms and SRO’s are, where the chicken hawks work the streets and docks, where weapons are always close to hand and the police write off murders and assaults. It’s the world of John Board and John Puddle and others like them.

Leonard Marks is a retired New York State parole officer and psycho-therapist who has published eight exciting westerns about a knife wielding con man and professional killer and one novel attempting to explain the world of social work as he knew it.