In 1940s Harlem, a lie can keep you alive. Or get you killed on the church steps.Dahlia Wainwright runs her dead mother's beauty salon on Lenox Avenue.She rents the back room to a man who runs numbers.She keeps her head down, her ledger clean, and her sister's secrets closer than her own.Then her sister Vera misses her call at the Cotton Club.And her apartment door stands open a crack, with nothing behind it but the drip of a faucet and a silence that has teeth.The same week, a runner named Dell Monroe bleeds out on the church steps two blocks over.Eight hundred dollars gone. A knife wound below his ribs.Nobody saw the man who did it.Nobody wants to.But Dahlia has a letter she was never meant to read.A locket that doesn't belong to anyone living.And a name that keeps surfacing where it shouldn't.The more she pulls the thread, the more the avenue's powerful men want her to stop."You go asking the wrong questions on this street," a voice warns her, "and you'll be the next thing they fish out of the Hudson."A councilman with secrets.A king who owns the block.A red herring that frays in her hands.Everyone on Lenox Avenue is wearing a face that isn't theirs.Dahlia learned young that the truth is a luxury people like her can't always afford.But Vera is gone, the dead are piling up, and the lie is closing in on the only family she has left.To find her sister and clear the dead, she has to walk straight into the lie this whole neighborhood is built on.And expose the one truth powerful enough to bury her with it.The Lenox Avenue Lie is a twisty, atmospheric 1940s Harlem murder mystery about an anonymous letter, a missing sister, hidden motives, corruption, and a past that refuses to stay dead.Perfect for readers who love historical crime fiction, amateur-sleuth mysteries, noir atmosphere, twisty whodunits, and stories in the tradition of Walter Mosley. A standalone mystery with a satisfying, hard-edged reveal.