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Club Calvi's Top 3 FicPicks for June are novels that are set in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
In "Waiting on a Friend," a young woman living in the East Village in 1984 can see the ghosts of friends who have died of AIDS. But when her best friend passes, he's out of her reach, and she takes desperate measures.
A "Pair of Aces" by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray is based on New York's first black woman prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office. In the book, she teams up with a famous madam to bring down infamous mobster Lucky Luciano.
"The Fervent Whites" by De'Shawn Charles Winslow is about a white couple, wrongfully convicted of murder, who are freed from prison and return to their predominantly Black Hudson Valley hamlet. Their neighbors fear the couple wants revenge.
You can read excerpts and VOTE on the books below. Voting closes Sunday, June 7, at 6 p.m.
Club Calvi books may contain adult themes.
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"Waiting on a Friend" by Natalie Adler
From the publisher: Renata is a young lesbian-about-town who can see ghosts, something she's doing more and more of lately as too many of her friends are dying of a new, terrifying disease. When Renata's best friend Mark dies of complications from AIDS, Renata is devastated by the loss of the person she loved most in the world. And to her disappointment and increasing despair, Mark seems unwilling or unable to return for the proper goodbye they both were denied.
While Renata waits anxiously for Mark, she must stay vigilant: a mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighborhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. What first seems like a scam reveals itself to be far more sinister, targeting the soul of Renata's community. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends' memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York. But haunting her every step is Mark, the one ghost who stubbornly refuses to reappear.
Natalie Adler is from New Jersey and lives in New York City.
"Waiting on a Friend" by Natalie Adler (ThriftBooks) $21
"A Pair of Aces" by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
From the publisher: Eunice Carter, assistant district attorney for the City of New York and Manhattan's first Black female prosecutor, has her sights set on the one and only Lucky Luciano, head of New York City's five largest organized crime families. Other prosectors have tried to bring down Lucky, but they've all focused on the crime syndicate's traditional businesses—bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking, and drug dealing—or tax evasion. No one has thought to approach the mob through its role in prostitution. Until Eunice. But she can't get Luciano alone.
Polly Adler has worked long and hard to build up her high-class brothel business. Her client list is filled with well-known names, both the famous and the infamous, who all know her booze is top-notch, her music first-rate, her food exquisite, and her girls the best. But Lucky has gone too far, putting her girls in danger, and Polly finally sees the chance to end his reign once and for all.
Together, Eunice and Polly fashion a case utilizing a network of women. Bridging the enormous divide between them and risking their own lives, they assemble evidence bit by bit, under the nose of the man they're trying to convict. It is this very alliance—of two women from vastly different worlds—that launches the most sensational trial New York City has ever seen.
Marie Benedict lives in Pittsburgh. Victoria Christopher Murray was born in Queens and lives near Washington, D.C.
"A Pair of Aces" by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray (ThriftBooks) $23
"The Fervent Whites" by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
From the publisher: The truth is closer than you think—just beyond the fence.
The year is 1982, and the people of the Hudson Valley community of Fervent have begun to move on from a homicide that upended the once quiet town. When the former neighbors who were convicted of the crime, James and Ella White, are proven innocent, released from prison, and return to Fervent, some people have cause for concern.
Sylvia Upshaw and her best friend, Lafayette "Fate" Jolly, are uneasy about the Whites' return. While the Whites were incarcerated, Sylvia revealed an explosive secret to their adopted son, Morgan, with devastating consequences. During the murder trial, Fate's testimony helped seal their fate. James and Ella won't let the betrayals go unpunished. Sylvia and Fate quickly become victims of harassment from the Whites, and when another murder is committed in Fervent, the town is left to fend for itself.
De'Shawn Charles Winslow lives in New Jersey.
"The Fervent Whites" by De'Shawn Charles Winslow (ThriftBooks) $21
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Excerpt: "Waiting on a Friend" by Natalie Adler
Ghosts
When Mark died, I thought I'd start seeing him around more. I saw John LoBriglio right after his memorial standing on Fourteenth Street with his hands in his pockets, keeping tabs on who showed. I helped Billy Kellerman save his beautiful clothes from being thrown into the trash and then comforted him after his two-faced ex made off with his boots. The first of the Davids to die, David Green, bugged me for a month about getting in touch with his lover, who had died in December. I wanted to know why he thought I could help, if ghosts gossip or what, but he just kept asking about Paul, Paul, Paul. I said to him, "Look, David, you can't get possessive. Why don't you try Ohio, since that's where they took him away? Why don't you go haunt his family instead of me? That pastor father of his deserves a little responsibility." He said he already tried, that he had gone to Paul's funeral in Akron and no one knew who he was. Eventually, I had to break it to David that Paul had already moved on, and that when I had seen him, he hadn't asked about David.
Mark died of complications. Don't we all, he would have said. June 5, 1984, 11:42 p.m., Bellevue Hospital. That night I was home. I was supposed to go see our friend Leon, but I had one of those terrible headaches you get when the weather changes and everything, even your scalp, hurts— and besides, I was hungover. So I lay in bed with a bag of frozen peas melting on my forehead, half reading last week's New York. I'd grabbed it from a stack of magazines left by the trash because the headline interested me: "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." I'd been hearing that line my whole life (at least since they actually used to call it the Lower East Side, not the East Village), but I couldn't deny that things were changing more quickly than usual. Anyway, the phone didn't ring once and I was home all night. The next morning, I got the call. It was a friend of a friend, Michael something, who used to be in a band with Joe and Kurt and who first introduced Mark to Patrick, his last boyfriend. Someone must have said, Okay, who's gonna tell Renata. That's eleven hours he was dead and I didn't know.
I had assumed I would be with him when he died. Hearing is the last sense to go, I've learned. When the time came, I planned to put my lips to his ears and tell him it would be okay, that he was loved, that we would remember him always, that he wasn't alone and he could let go now. I thought it would be important for him to know he didn't have to hang on, or around, for anyone. I had pictured it happening so when the day came, I would know what to do. I thought it would be in the day, I thought there would be light. It would be in a well-lit, clean hospital room, even though I didn't know anyone who had received a decent send-off. Paul, who had also died at Bellevue, told me that his deathbed had a pool of blood under it left over from the last guy, because none of the orderlies would touch it. "You'd think a guy could at least die in a pool of his own g****** blood," he'd said, shaking his head.
Mark wouldn't die in our apartment. He couldn't die in the home we'd shared for ten years. It would have to be in a hospital, because if he died at home, someone would have to take his body. I thought all this through, I couldn't help it. I pictured him at peace, and I pictured us alone. Maybe that's selfish of me. He had a lot of friends— we have a lot of friends. And then, I would stay with his body until they made me leave, and then I'd get myself to the diner and drink a bottomless cup of weak coffee. And after that, I couldn't imagine.
But instead, Patrick took Mark to the ER one night when Mark couldn't breathe. Patrick didn't tell anyone but a few of his own friends. He didn't call me. After I got the phone call— I don't know why I did it, probably to take it out on someone— I decided to tell his mother. His folks were in the phone book. "Mark died," I said. "Your son," I added, to remind her. She just cleared her throat and said, in a paper-thin voice, "Thank you for letting me know." I could hear her gently hang up the phone. Two days later, there was a polite message on our machine: There would be a service at the Norwegian Seamen's Church in Brooklyn, and I could tell anyone appropriate. I didn't know who that meant, so I told everyone.
Christians, it turns out, take their sweet time putting a body in the ground, so I had a whole week before his funeral. I can barely remember how I got through it— I couldn't believe I had to keep getting up every morning, and he was the one who usually made the coffee— but I know I looked for him everywhere. I walked river to river and sat at our table at the Ukrainian place and went to the movies and sat in the back row, where we used to laugh through the whole film, and went dancing and expected him to show whenever I heard one of our songs. I was sure that the right needle drop would bring him back because our time together had been taken from us and, if he could, he would come back to claim it.
But in all honesty, that feeling of stolen time wasn't just because he died at twenty-f******- nine, but because for the past few weeks, he had been spending his nights at Patrick's. It had been a while since we'd just hung out all day, reading out good passages of our books to each other, one of us going to get some beer while the other made spaghetti, ready to see where the night went. The apartment felt like it was waiting for him, too. When someone dies, their stuff is still right where they left it. That one gray sock could stay on the floor forever. The glass with one sip of water left will evaporate.
I tried to be patient. I thought he might do something cheeky, like tap me on the shoulder during his funeral, so I waited. It might have been an easier week if there were rules for seeing ghosts, or patterns for who came back and who didn't and why and after how much time had passed. In the movies, ghosts have scores to settle, or they come back after dying in some horrific way, or because the person was too evil to be truly killed. I don't believe any of that. I figure that some people become ghosts because they don't like moving, on or otherwise. Sometimes the ghosts I saw wanted help or asked for something specific, but most of the time they just wanted to be acknowledged, a nod on their way to who knows. Sometimes they didn't bother with me at all.
Excerpted from Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler. Copyright © 2026 by Natalie Adler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpt: ""A Pair of Aces" by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray
New York, New York
April 4, 1935
The sharp clip of heels on concrete echoes throughout my cell, growing louder with each step, and I brace myself. The fast tempo isn't the lazy thunk of a guard's boots or even the confident, slightly bored stride of a lawyer's dark tan Derby shoes. No, the staccato, metallic sound is unusual for the corridors of the 30th Precinct Station House, and yet, I should be able to identify it. After all, I've spent many a long hour listening to the clatter of shoes as they cross bedroom floors to engage in all manner of debauchery.
I start to get concerned, and then I have it. Only the heel of a woman's oxford pump could make that sort of solid but somehow dainty rat-a-tat-tat. With its elegant, womanly heel curving into a narrow point and its sensible perforated top designed to resemble a man's oxford dress shoe, the oxford pump is the shoe of a woman who stands between two worlds. The shoe of a woman who means business but hasn't entirely surrendered her femininity. Among other things.
But now I'm even more curious. Because it's strange that the sort of person who'd wear those shoes would be in this jail. The 30th Precinct Station House jail is for drug addicts, streetwalkers, and thieves. Unless, the woman in the oxford pumps is a rare female lawyer.
With this thought, a new sort of worry sets in. Could she be here for me? When I was booked into the station, the charge was listed as pandering, or "facilitating prostitution." But what if they're planning on squeezing me for information on Dutch? Do the cops know that he and his thugs were in that hotel suite with us—just before Mad Dog Coll was murdered?
My heart begins thudding in time with her step. Not that an onlooker could tell. They'd see a petite, well-manicured, composed woman of an indeterminate age in sky-high heels. I pull my fur stole tight around my shoulders like a shield. I've worked long and hard to build up my business—traveled far from Russia with its poverty and its pogroms and endured far worse on the shores of this so-called Golden Land—and I have no intention of returning to a desultory existence.
So when the clatter of heels grows louder and abruptly stops in front of my cell, I do not look up. Neither of us speaks for a long moment. Finally, she clears her throat. "Miss Adler?"
There, between the steel-gray bars of my cell, I peer first at her shoes: two-toned oxford pumps. I have to suppress a self-satisfied smile. I knew it. Working my way upward, I take note of the sensible stockings and the navy worsted wool skirt, the coordinating jacket cinched at the waist with a cordovan leather belt that matches her shoes. All as I expected for a woman lawyer.
Then my eyes reach her attractive face with its symmetrical features, and nothing is as I guessed. Because the woman standing before me is the rarest of creatures. Not only is she a woman in a man's world, but she's a colored woman in a white man's world. I've forged my way in a man's world, too, but nothing quite like this.
"Who's asking?" I answer when my eyes meet hers. My tone is barbed, because I've got to be very careful to whom I speak and what I say. I've got to protect myself.
"Assistant District Attorney Eunice Carter," the woman answers.
A colored female assistant district attorney? I thought I'd never see the day. In fact, it occurs to me that the only one I've ever heard of is the woman Dewey hired for his special group of lawyers dedicated to fighting the Mob. My stomach lurches at the thought that this Eunice Carter could be one of Dewey's and that she might be here specifically to get me to talk about Dutch and the role he played in the murder of Mad Dog. Why else would she come here now?
I will myself to stay still, stay silent, and I remind myself that it isn't necessarily about Dutch. After all, the name Polly Adler is known in and of itself, and arresting me for pandering is a feather in the cap for any cop or assistant district attorney. I must wait for this unusual woman to play her cards.
She's patient and steely, though, and can play the waiting game, too. Our eyes are locked—hers deep, dark brown and mine a coppery shade. Just when I think I might break first, she says, "I'm here to talk to you about your work."
"And what work would that be?" I ask.
"I understand you run a house of prostitution," she says matter-of-factly.
"I don't know what on earth you're talking about." I shake my head as if her comment is ludicrous.
"Actually, I've heard that you run the most prestigious house of prostitution in the city. Apparently, you're so famous that the phrase 'going to Polly's' has become a euphemism for engaging in the sort of illicit fun you offer."
I will not be lured in by her compliments; I wasn't born yesterday.
When I don't speak, she continues. "Miss Adler, I am not here to gather evidence for the pandering charges that have been lodged against you. I'm only interested in learning how your business operates. I promise."
She seems earnest, and honestly, I'm relieved that she's not asking any questions about Dutch or the Mob. But it's clear this Eunice Carter doesn't understand anything about me or my business if she thinks I'll roll over so easily. I keep my lips sealed.
"Miss Adler, I'd be grateful for any information you might be willing to share. It must be a thrill to run an establishment as well-known as Polly's."
Here she goes with the flattery again. I've got to shut this down. "Assistant District Attorney Carter," I say, enunciating every syllable. "I don't know a thing about running a 'house of prostitution.' My arrest is a big mistake. I'm just a lady who was out on the town for a few drinks with some friends. But I will tell you something for nothing. No girl wakes up in the morning wishing to spend her life as a whore."
Excerpted from A Pair of Aces by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray Copyright © 2026 by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpt: "The Fervent Whites" by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
Chapter One
June 1982
The triplet of knocks came from the front door just as Sylvia Upshaw and her two children were putting on their shoes, about to walk over to Mrs. Talbot's house. Syl's daughter, GiGi, her first-born, peered through the living room window, which looked out onto their small front lawn.
"It's the Whites," she said.
"The Whites? James and Ella White?" Syl asked. A sudden pang of fear fluttered in her stomach.
Then Syl's son, RJ, had a look. "What the—" RJ said, his eyes fixed on their unexpected guests.
Syl shooed her teens away from the window and glanced out herself. There they stood, James and Ella White, her fresh-out-of-prison neighbors. James was rocking back and forth on his heels. Ella stood still, wearing what Syl might describe as a half-smile. James stretched his neck and winced. Everyone in the hamlet of Fervent—in all of Saugerties, and maybe even in the whole Hudson Valley—knew they had been released from prison a week ago. But no one had expected them to return to the neighborhood.
The two of them stood on Syl's porch, which in actuality was just a wide, square block of cement. Only one of Syl's kitchen chairs could fit. Syl had asked her ex-husband to build a real porch so that they could sit out on it together, but he never got around to it. He had been too busy getting around to other women's needs.
"I've never spoken to murderers before," RJ whispered, towering over Syl and GiGi.
"You won't speak to any today, either, dummy," GiGi shot back. "They're innocent, remember?"
"You know what I meant."
"Hush, both of you," Syl ordered. "Stand over there." She pointed to a far corner of their living room where a bookshelf hosted forty or fifty paperbacks—romances, mysteries, and thrillers.
"Ma, open the door. You're being rude."
"Quiet, GiGi," she whispered, pointing again to the corner. GiGi hesitated—a new but subtle defiance the girl had begun showing in recent weeks, now that she was a rising high school senior. RJ, a year younger than his sister, would soon follow suit, Syl imagined.
Before heading to the door, Syl looked out the window at the Whites' hands. The rippling in her stomach got quicker by the second. She saw no weapons or anything that could be used as one. Syl used her foot to move the old beach towel she had tucked at the bottom of the door. June was three-quarters gone and summer was in full swing. They had been running the window unit for a couple of weeks. Most of the houses in Fervent leaked air; no matter how hard the owners tried to keep the cool in, it found its way out. Back in '73, Syl had inherited the house, and its problems and its mortgage, from her great-aunt.
Syl opened the heavier inner door and wondered if the glass storm door that separated her from the Whites reminded them of receiving visitors at Bedford Hills and Attica. Given how close Syl and her children had been to the Whites' son—Morgan had been one of the kindest, most dependable people in the hamlet—she also wondered how they felt about never receiving visits or even a letter from her.
"Sylvia," Ella said, head tilted just a little to one side. Ella never called her Syl, like everyone else. "It's so good to see you." The flutter in Syl's gut was now annoyance at what she suspected was phoniness coming from Ella.
"Ella. James," Syl said, folding her arms just under her breasts. "I didn't know you two were back in Saugerties."
The Whites donned what may have been genuine smiles—given their newfound freedom. They weren't cursing Syl or daring her to come out and face them. Do they know I told their secret while they were in prison? she wondered.
"Sorry to drop by unannounced like this. We tried to call from Mrs. Talbot's, but the line was busy. "I told James we may as well just knock and see, since we saw your car." Syl couldn't believe they had gone to Mrs. Talbot's. Syl knew how her neighbors could be. Curt and Patrice "Peaches" Bainbridge had probably greeted the Whites but avoided them after that—too proud to admit they'd been wrong. Ervin and Suzy John were likely to have gone into Mrs. Talbot's bathroom and prayed for everyone's safety. Mark and Belinda Fleming likely treated the Whites as though they were Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal. And if Hoke Robinson was there, he probably shook their hands, welcomed them back to Fervent, and left. He wasn't a big fan of James's, but he, too, had always believed they were innocent of Paul Hope's murder.
Ella explained that when they'd passed Mrs. Talbot's house on their way to their own—they had borrowed a car from James's uncle, down in the city—they'd noticed the balloons tied to Mrs. Talbot's door and the cars parked out front. So they'd stopped to see what was going on.
Syl's face must have betrayed her, because James said, "We know, we know. You guys weren't expecting us to move back here so soon after getting out."
If Syl had thought there was the slightest chance that James and Ella would ever be released from prison, she would have never sat Morgan down and told him the secret she had sworn to keep. As she stood there, looking at the Whites, she felt as though the guilt would chew her out of existence. She wanted James and Ella gone, away from her door.
Ella fanned herself with her hand. "Sylvia, do you have a few minutes?"
If GiGi and RJ hadn't been there, Syl might have told Ella no and asked the Whites not to return to her home. But the children would later accuse her of being rude, and they'd certainly ask questions she didn't want to answer. So Syl opened the door, stepped aside, and invited them in.