Heavy Sugar - by William Boyle (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The latest from the "poet laureate of Brooklyn" is zany, foul-mouthed, and tender-hearted 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for William Boyle

"Boyle's characters evoke the working-class romantics of Bruce Springsteen, small-time and scrambling for money, love, or answers."
--Oprah Daily

"Boyle is able to do what today's best crime fiction writers do so well--tell a captivating, page-turning thriller, but one defined by its characters and the choices they make, rather than the circumstances into which they have been thrust."
--The Washington Post

"No one can make the everyday vagaries of life feel like Greek tragedies the way William Boyle can. He effortlessly maps the path of desire that moves through the human heart like burning chrome."
--S. A. Cosby

About the Author

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in the southern Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised, including his debut, Gravesend; the story collection Death Don't Have No Mercy; The Lonely Witness, nominated for the Hammett Prize; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, an Amazon Best Book of 2019; City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020; and Shoot the Moonlight Out, listed by CrimeReads as one of the ten best noir novels of 2021. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.