FINALIST FOR THE HARPER LEE PRIZE FOR LEGAL FICTION 2016
FINALIST FOR THE MACAVITY AWARD 2016

The year is 1936.

Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America, Mob overlord and bootlegger millionaire. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown – grifter, heroin addict and sometime prostitute – is the witness who claims she can do it.

Only a wily defence attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, and between Dewey and the New York Governor’s mansion.


As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom. The events of this seminal Mob trial will introduce America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organised crime, and leave its culture, laws and politics for ever changed.