The Authorized Version

23 Shades of Black by Kenneth Wishnia is set in New York City in a time especially ripe for a mystery novel:

Nowadays, crime in NYC is down to historic lows, but from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, it was the Wild West: huge swaths of the South Bronx were burnt out and abandoned, and the subways were filthy, covered with graffiti, broiling in summer and freezing in winter, and late at night the transit cops did not even bother going into the last car on the Number 5 train, known as the party car, where marijuana was openly smoked. It was a tough time for cops, too, who spent 99 percent of their time answering
911 emergency calls, so they had no time for relatively minor infractions, or even some relatively major ones. That is why I love this photo of a gun-toting female police officer playing a game with the kids in a poor neighborhood right in the middle of the street.

23 Shades of Black, (an Edgar Allan Poe Award finalist for Best First Novel), featuring my Ecuadorian-American NYPD cop Filomena Buscarsela, is set during this era, when NYC was still recovering from the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s (as embodied by the Daily News famous headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD). It was a crazy time.

Austin Comacho's Russian Roulette takes readers to the Eastern European community in Washington D.C.:

Russian Roulette takes place primarily in Washington DC. Not the political DC but the neighborhoods of the city. Georgetown, Capitol Hill, Anacostia – each has its own personality. And because the Eastern European community is central to the mystery, we visit The Russia House (pictured) a warm and authentic restaurant that is truly a slice of Russia in the Dupont Circle area. I hope readers will come to know the breadth and diversity of The District through the eyes of Private Eye Hannibal Jones.

Dale T. Phillips's A Memory of Grief is set in Fort Williams Park in Portland Maine: