Elon Green

Last Call reconstructs a run of killings in and around New York between 1991 and 1993, in which men were taken from gay bars in Manhattan and their bodies left along highways in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Elon Green gives most of the book to the men themselves, to their families and to the bars they drank in, and comparatively little to Richard Rogers, the nurse convicted of two of the deaths in 2005 after a fingerprint match. The argument running underneath is about attention: how slowly the cases were joined up, how the press handled them, and what it meant to be a closeted man in that city at that moment. Celadon published it in 2021 and it took the Edgar Award for best fact crime the year after. Green has written for The New Yorker, The Appeal and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and edits the true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts.