Best Served Cold

Philadelphia, winter 1927. Some debts get paid in blood.

On a moonlit back road between Camden and Philadelphia, the Bailey brothers ambush a bootlegging convoy, kill the men guarding it, and sell the stolen liquor to Mickey Duffy's rival. It's the kind of greedy, thoughtless thing hungry men do.

Three days later, Duffy's men drive out to the Bailey farm to take back what's theirs. Fifteen-year-old Delores Bailey watches her father gunned down in his own yard.

Maggie Barnes has spent two years trying to build a case against Mickey Duffy the honest way, and she has almost nothing to show for it. So when a girl in a patched coat and worn-out shoes turns up wanting Duffy dead, Maggie sees something she hasn't had before: someone on the inside. Someone with every reason to talk.

She also sees a child who could still be turned back from the edge — if anyone bothered to try.

Inspector Frank Geyer sees something else entirely. He spent his life chasing a man who wore charm like a coat and felt nothing underneath, and he has been dead long enough to know what he's looking at. He thinks Delores is exactly that. He thinks Maggie is being played.

For the first time since a widow and a ghost shook on a partnership, the two of them cannot agree. And while they argue, Philadelphia's bootleggers go to war over stolen barrels and wounded pride, and the papers count the bodies.

Revenge is patient. It waits. It keeps.

Best Served Cold is the third novel in the Bootleggers' Chronicles, a historical mystery series set in Prohibition-era Philadelphia. For readers who love resourceful women, a partnership worth rooting for, and history researched down to the toll on the Camden bridge.