Last Call

Last Call is a work of narrative nonfiction about the Last Call Killer, who targeted gay men in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, and about the long effort to catch him. Elon Green reports on a run of baffling and brutal crimes and tells the story publicly for the first time.

The book opens at the Townhouse Bar in midtown Manhattan in July 1992. A pianist seems to know every song, and patrons sing along. Nearby, a man sips a Scotch and water. He looks bland and forgettable, nothing like a typical idea of a serial killer, but he is one, and he has picked out a gray-haired man as his next target. That man is not his first victim and will not be his last.

The killer had many of the traits of the most notorious serial murderers. Even so, his crimes have been almost entirely forgotten, in part because of his victims' sexuality, in part because of the very high murder rates of the era, and in part because the AIDS epidemic was overshadowing everything else.

Green follows the investigation across the decades and also draws a portrait of the victims and of the vibrant gay community that lived with both danger and resilience during those years.