The All-Night Key

About this book

Frankie Mercado has spent years inventing New York for tourists — ghost stories on Doyers Street, half-true legends about walled-up bakeries — because the real city never sat still long enough to be known. Then her grandfather Bo, an all-night locksmith on Ludlow Street, dies and leaves her a single brass key stamped 99, fitting no lock anyone can find. Behind a false wall in his shop she discovers a tenement room preserved untouched since 1907 — and a gruff old token-booth clerk who insists she wasn't supposed to find it yet. The key, he says, belongs to a chain of ordinary people who have quietly kept pieces of the vanishing city for generations. But the chain is breaking, someone with deep pockets is buying up its hiding places, and the key in Frankie's hand may be the last one. To learn what it opens, she'll have to follow the city down.