The Gargoyle Hunters

What E.L. Doctorow's World's Fair did for the New York of the 1930s, this evocative debut novel does for the vividly crumbling New York of the 1970s. Hilarious and poignant, it is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons.In 1974, with both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father's illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive 19th-century architectural sculptures—gargoyles—right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city's architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal. Desperate both to connect with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage on the brownstone where Griffin lives...