Welcome, readers. Today I am interviewing Lester Young McKinley. Lester is a fictional, yet important, character in a series of books by me, Michael Sears, TOWER OF BABEL, LOVE THE STRANGER, and a third that’s somewhere in the editing process. Call it TBA for now.
Me: Can we start with your name? I imagine it is not by chance that you were named for one of the great jazz saxophonists.
Lester: Not just one of…THE great. The GOAT. “Pres.” Billie Holliday gave him that nickname because he was the President of the Saxophone. My father worked at the old Colony Music store on Broadway. He got to know all those guys. Those ‘cats’, my father would say. Some of them lived in the neighborhood. I’d wake up early on a Sunday morning and my father would be just getting home and me mums would be cooking eggs and cornbread for him and a few musicians who’d followed him home.
Me: What neighborhood was that?
Lester: We had an apartment in St. Albans, just off Linden Boulevard. Southern Queens, for the out-of-towners. A lot of jazz musicians lived in Queens.
Me: Was your father a musician?
Lester: A music lover. Mums played piano a little and tried to get me some lessons.
Me: And?
Lester: Didn’t take.
Me: But you inherited his love of music.
Lester: Truth. And maybe his taste for liquor. My father was a drinking man. You didn’t have to know him long to know the truth of that. He took me for a drink at Jack Dempseys the week they closed. I was seventeen, but no one was checking IDs. Eighteen was legal back then. I don’t know if he thought it was my first – it wasn’t.
Me: You were close then?
Lester: Not really. It’s not easy being close with a drinking man.
Me: And your mother?
Lester: She loved him. I remember it as a happy marriage. He wasn’t a mean drunk. He’d be laughing right up until he passed out on the couch. She didn’t laugh much after he died.
Me: From the drink?
Lester: He had the sugar and docs told him he had to cut back so I guess you could say he chose to go.
Me: How old were you then?
Lester: Just turned twenty.
Me: Ouch.
Lester: Amen to that. After I finished my time defending the American way of life by working in an Army warehouse outside Houston, I came home and lived with Mums while I went to City.
Me: I didn’t know you went to college. Did you finish?
Lester: I went for a long time and got nowhere. Then Mums passed. I got married. Had to work. But mostly I didn’t.
Me: Are you still married?
Lester: Raquelle wised up to me early on. Not long after our daughter was born. We didn’t speak for years. She remarried, but when he passed, I got in touch. We’re friends now. She’s good people. I get to see her and my granddaughters.
Me: And your daughter?
Lester: That woman hates me.
Me: On that note, I think I’ll change the subject. How’d you get into doing title work?
Lester: Yeah. Title search. I did other things first. But I didn’t do well at the showing up every day part of working. Title is piece work. The title insurance company gives you a property to research. You check county records. Most of the time the deeds are clear. You report back and get a check. It’s not hard work but if ya hustle you can do all right.
Me: Did you? Hustle, I mean.
Lester: I always hustled. Hustling comes natural to me. But only so far. Life needs balance. You treat the clerks polite, check everything twice, you do the job, you do okay. Raquelle wanted a little more than that. She thought she was marrying a man who was going to go places. And not stop for a couple of cocktails on the way back home.
Me: Will you ever get sober?
Lester: I been sober plenty of times. Since I started working with Ted, I get sober every Monday and stay that way until sundown Friday.
Me: Would you explain a little bit of what you do?
Lester: Ted does the lawyering. I do the research and most of the client relationships. I find missing money that’s sitting in the courts and get it back to folks who lost it. And we take a piece out for the service. No one ever complains about getting back something they thought was long gone.
Me: Where do you find this missing cash?
Lester: In the files. When someone loses a property to foreclosure, they’re not always thinking straight. If the buyer at the auction pays more than was owed, that money is supposed to go to the original owner. Surplus money they call it. Only the guy who just lost his wife or his business, or his parents, or died without a will, or a whole lot of other calamities may not know to ask for what’s his. I look through the records and when I find some of that surplus money I go looking for the rightful owner.
Me: Who can’t believe his good fortune and immediately thanks you.
Lester: No. Most of my first contacts tell me to go away. They lost the house. It’s gone. It takes some hustle to get ‘em to listen. That’s what I do. I’m good at getting people to talk to me. And once we’re talking, they’re going to sign.
Me: Sounds smooth.
Lester: Sometimes. More often, there’s a wrinkle or two that needs ironing out. And sometimes, it gets downright messy. I’ve been chased, beaten up, and damn near blown up. Nothing like that ever happened in thirty-five years doing title work.
Me: But you’re happy?
Lester: Being happy is hard work. My ex-wife treats me like an old friend. My grandkids like me. I got a roof over my head, I can afford a nice coat, and I am content with bar rail vodka. Life is good.
Queens #2
Ted Molloy, a Queens attorney with a troublesome penchant for noble causes, investigates the murder of a corrupt immigration lawyer in the sharply observed follow-up to the 2022 Nero Award winner Tower of Babel.
Ted Molloy has hit his stride with a foreclosure investment scheme that brings him into contact with a cast of shady characters across New York’s most diverse borough, from Hollis to Howard Beach. On the side, he helps his activist girlfriend, Kenzie, with her work to halt construction on “the Spike”—a corporate-backed development project in Corona that would displace the largely immigrant communities surrounding it.
Stop the Spike is heating up: Kenzie spends most of her waking hours fending off smear campaigns and touring community spaces in Queens to spread the word, which she can do thanks to Mohammed, Ted and Kenzie’s close friend, a recent Yemeni immigrant and most expedient cab driver. But when Kenzie learns that Mohammed’s immigration lawyer may be taking advantage of him financially, she decides to snoop around at the law offices—and comes face to face with a dead body as a shadowy figure flees the scene. Now Kenzie is the sole witness to a potential murder. Can Ted and his team get to the bottom of the murder so they can stop the Spike once and for all?
Explore every shady corner of Queens in this keen mystery, the second installment of award-winning author Michael Sears’s critically acclaimed series.
Thriller Crime [ Soho Press, Incorporated, On Sale: November 4, 2025, Trade Paperback, ISBN: 9781641297370 / ]
Michael Sears spent over twenty years on Wall Street, rising to become a managing director at Paine Webber and Jeffries & Co., before leaving the business in 2005. He lives in Sea Cliff, New York.
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