Stacy Horn + Gillian Flynn: The Killing Fields of East New York

Join us for an in-person event with journalist and author Stacy Horn for a discussion of her new book The Killing Fields of East New York. Joining Stacy in conversation is #1 New York Times bestselling author Gillian Flynn. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that would come to be known as the Killing Fields.

On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, M**der rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying.

But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier. In response to redlining and discriminatory housing practices, the Johnson administration passed the Housing and Urban Development Act in 1968. The Federal Housing Authority aimed to use this piece of legislation to help low-income families of color finally achieve homeownership. But they could never have predicted how banks, lenders, realtors, and corrupt FHA officials themselves would use the newly passed law to make victims of the very people they were supposed to help, and the devastation they would leave in their wake.

A compulsively readable hybrid of true crime and investigative journalism, The Killing Fields of East New York reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots. Following the dual threads of the hunt for the network of criminals behind the first subprime mortgage scandal and the ensuing downfall of East New York, Stacy Horn weaves a compelling narrative of government failure, a desperate community, and ultimately the largest series of mortgage fraud prosecutions in American history. The Killing Fields of East New York deftly demonstrates how different types of crime are profoundly entangled, and how the crimes committed in nice suits and corner offices are just as destructive as those committed on the street.

Stacy Horn is a journalist and author of nonfiction books, including Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York and The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad. Mary Roach has hailed her for “combining awe-fueled curiosity with topflight reporting skills,” while others have described her work as "immaculately researched" and "several notches above the typical reporter's insights." Horn’s commentaries have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, and she lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Heidi Jo Brady

Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl and the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects. She is the publisher of Gillian Flynn Books, which publishes conversation-starting and gasp-inducing titles like The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi and the Sister Holiday Mysteries from Margot Douaihy.

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