The Butcher of Borough Park — Sonja Sharp

Set in Crown Heights Brooklyn, "The Butcher of Borough Park" chronicles the life of Ursula Mazoltuv Rom, an intrepid young journalist, the daughter of Soviet immigrants, who spends her days chasing corpses and roaming the halls of Kings County courtrooms as a tabloid stringer. Four foot nine inches tall and seventy pounds wet, Ursula is a member of a ragged, multi-hued tribe of outerborough journalists: obsessively literate, foulmouthed and hungry for a break. When she re-encounters Dov, a photographer of Ethiopian extraction, she swoons. Their misfit alliance leads Mazoltuv to the story of her career.

In a plot inspired by actual events, Dov tips her off to an illegal organ ring comprising a web of matchmakers, corrupt rabbis, immigrant donors, and debt-ridden buyers spanning Brooklyn to Tel Aviv. Mazoltuv s atypical stature again becomes her strength as she poses as an ailing kidney buyer, seeking out the hidden back rooms of kosher butchershops and drug-ridden Orthodox nightclubs in scenes equal parts Weegee and Isaac Babel.

Inflected with pulp fiction, Russian antiheroism, and elements of the new immigrant novel, "The Butcher of Borough Park" is a paean to a changing Brooklyn and its denizens.