“What Vienna Saw”
Star readers know Lyle Greenfield as a regular writer of lengthy and entertaining letters to the editor, datelined Amagansett, but of course there's more to the man. Fiction, for instance, noirish in atmosphere, psychological in suspense. A thriller, if you will, like "What Vienna Saw," which takes place in New York's West Village in 1982, when grittiness ruled and Warhol and Basquiat strode the downtown art scene. There and then a woman witnesses a nightclub murder possibly related to an art theft.
Interest piqued, crime fans? The author dropped a line to say it'll be at BookHampton in East Hampton. And there's always the 800-pound gorilla of retail, Amazon, which lists the title at $9.95, available as of Dec. 11.
“The Last Resort”
Elsewhere on the novel front, out of Maine by way of Montauk comes Kay Tobler Liss's "The Last Resort," the title referring to one out on The End, where a Manhattan attorney with his marriage and his work life in shambles seeks shelter in the depths of the off-season. He runs into, as you'd expect, a fisherman and a surfer, but also, the crux of the matter, "a Native American woman fighting to preserve ancestral land threatened with development," which she does at great personal risk.
From Plain View Press of Austin, Tex., and retailing for $19.95, this is the debut effort by Ms. Liss, who has written for The Shelter Island Reporter and The Suffolk Times, and who formerly lived at Third House at Montauk County Park when her husband was the manager there.