JayneB Reviews / Book Reviews1930s / American historical / Historical / lawyer / New York City / novelization / organized crime / POC / prostitute / Womens-FictionNo Comments

A gripping novel about two trailblazing women on opposite sides of the law—a prosecutor and a madam—who team up to bring down notorious Mob boss Lucky Luciano in 1930s New York, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the million-copy bestseller The Personal Librarian.

Eunice Carter, assistant district attorney for the City of New York and Manhattan’s first Black female prosecutor, has her sights set on the one and only Lucky Luciano, head of New York City’s five largest organized crime families. Other prosectors have tried to bring down Lucky, but they’ve all focused on the crime syndicate’s traditional businesses—bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking, and drug dealing—or tax evasion. No one has thought to approach the mob through its role in prostitution. Until Eunice. But she can’t get Luciano alone.

Polly Adler has worked long and hard to build up her high-class brothel business. Her client list is filled with well-known names, both the famous and the infamous, who all know her booze is top-notch, her music first-rate, her food exquisite, and her girls the best. But Lucky has gone too far, putting her girls in danger, and Polly finally sees the chance to end his reign once and for all.

Together, Eunice and Polly fashion a case utilizing a network of women. Bridging the enormous divide between them and risking their own lives, they assemble evidence bit by bit, under the nose of the man they’re trying to convict. It is this very alliance—of two women from vastly different worlds—that launches the most sensational trial New York City has ever seen.

CW/TW – prostitution, violence against women, mention of drug use

Dear Ladies, 

I had never heard the details of what was behind the conviction of mobster “Lucky” Luciano in the mid 1930s but when I saw the blurb that said two women helped take him down, I wanted to read this book. Lawyer Eunice Carter and madam Polly Adler were totally different from each other but also both outsiders who had to fight to get where they were. Lawyer Eunice Carter, a woman of color, and Polly (nee Pearl) Adler, a Russian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the US alone at a young age have challenged the odds against them. 

Eunice’s grandfather was born enslaved and her family fled race riots in Atlanta. Now she has three college degrees, is married to a prominent dentist originally from Barbados, has a son. and is the first Black female assistant district attorney in the State of New York. Polly was sent by her father to the US at the age of twelve to get a job and earn the money needed to bring the rest of the family over. Raped, impregnated, and thrown out of the cousin’s house where she lived, she got a back alley abortion, and moved to NYC. Now she runs one of the elite brothels in the city where inteligencia, celebrities, politicians, and journalists, among others, gather. 

Eunice and the others working with New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey have been working on building legal cases against mobsters. Relegated to answering letters and phone calls from the public demanding that ‘something be done,’ Eunice begins to take notes and put pieces of the puzzle together before realizing that charging mob bosses with organized prostitution could be a viable way to get charges to stick. 

Polly made a deal with the devil – aka Dutch Schultz – in order to stay out of jail but after Schultz is gunned down and Lucky Luciano’s boys start trashing her place for fun, she realizes things are much worse. There is a new organized effort to take over running “the skirt trade” in NYC and Luciano is brutally behind it. When one of her girls gets kidnapped and Polly is slugged by Luciano trying to defend her, Polly sees that if she doesn’t do something, she’ll lose her position and her girls will suffer. 

Thus is born a hidden collaboration between an immigrant madam who can’t be caught snitching for fear of death and a Black female lawyer whose family and marriage are threatened for her work building this case. Will the women’s efforts be enough to bring down the most powerful mobster in the city and will they survive the threats against them?

As I said, I didn’t know the details behind the case and trial that convicted Lucky Luciano – and many of his associates. It’s thrilling that Eunice was the one who saw that going after him on vice charges – something that Dewey didn’t want to do – was the means to getting a conviction and that she stuck to her guns in pushing it. Polly is a madam running a house that exploits women but she tries to treat her girls well, looks after them with medical checks and good diets, and reportedly had to turn away women wanting to work for her. 

The collaboration to write the book and the mingling of details is good enough that I didn’t realize until reading the author notes that

is not the truth. Yet it does make sense that Eunice had some inside source to get details needed to build the case and having Polly be the one due to being threatened by Luciano’s real attempt to take over running prostitution in NYC also makes sense. Both women are fascinating in their own right and the story is compelling enough that I don’t mind reading the little details that got changed along with One thing that bothered me is that at times the extensive background details seem to be clunkily included and beyond what is needed to set a scene or character. But this is a book that seemed to flow and I gobbled it down in two days. B

~Jayne

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