Tasting the Apple

Philadelphia, 1926. Six years into Prohibition, and the whole city has learned to look away.

Maggie Barnes has stopped being a woman that things happen to. She's enrolled in night classes at Drexel, placed an advertisement for bookkeeping services, and walked the shops along Marshall Street asking for their business. A grocer. A milliner. A shoe store. It isn't much, but it's hers.

It has to be. The bank won't extend a commercial loan to a woman — they'll take a mortgage on her house instead, and the whole house with it if she falls behind. Her boy Tommy is nine now, with a suspension on his record and a future Maggie fully intends to see him keep.

Then a Marine colonel with a scarlet cape is handed the Philadelphia police department and told to clean it out. Colonel Smedley Butler is honest, stubborn, and hopelessly outnumbered. The officers he raids are on Mickey Duffy's payroll, and the magistrates turn them loose by morning. What Butler needs is someone on the inside — someone nobody would ever think to suspect.

Maggie has a lodger who serves at the colonel's elbow.

And she has a dearest friend named Edith Duffy.

Edith is the warmest woman Maggie knows. She is also married to the most dangerous man in Philadelphia, and her marriage is coming apart in ways she cannot admit to her charity committee or to anyone else. She trusts Maggie completely.

That is the trouble with knowing things. Inspector Frank Geyer has been dead for years and still cannot leave a case alone — and even he thinks Maggie should stay well clear of this one.

Loyalty to a friend. Loyalty to a city. In 1926 Philadelphia, a woman rarely gets to keep both.

Tasting the Apple is the second novel in the Bootleggers' Chronicles, a historical mystery series set in Prohibition-era Philadelphia. For readers who love resourceful women, friendships that cost something, and history researched right down to the price of a drink at the door.