Watch Your Back

Philadelphia, 1928, and the mean streets just got meaner.

Maggie Barnes has an office now. Business cards on order, a hook behind the door for her coat, and a partnership offered by a man who was impressed by her work. It took night classes, a mortgage she nearly lost the house over, and years of being told that no one hires a woman to keep their books.

She has never been further from the sink she started at. She has also never been further from her son.

Tommy is eleven. He runs bets for a bookie on his way home from school, keeps a share of what he collects, and has learned that the surest way to be somebody in this city is to be useful to the right men. Mickey Duffy thinks he's a good kid. Mickey Duffy has started to take an interest.

When Maggie finds her boy beaten half to death on a patch of gravel behind the schoolyard, she understands that the war she's been fighting out in the city has walked into her own kitchen.

So she stops chasing gangsters and starts chasing money. Liquor permits. Pharmacy licences. Industrial alcohol plants bought up by a smiling former lawyer from Cincinnati who has never been convicted of anything. It's slow, unglamorous, ledger-by-ledger work, and it's the first thing Maggie has tried that Mickey Duffy can't shoot his way out of.

Inspector Frank Geyer has been testing how far from the house a ghost can travel. Turns out — further than either of them expected.

Some sons drift. Some are recruited.

Watch Your Back is the fourth 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 price of a pint of bonded whiskey.