Innocence Lost

Philadelphia, 1924. A widow, a seven-year-old son, and a house she can't afford to lose.

When Maggie Barnes buried her husband, she buried the life she'd expected along with him. What's left is a rundown place on a street where she knows no one, a boy who needs more than she can give him, and a grocer's proposal she has no intention of accepting.

Independence means taking in lodgers — a young Irish constable, a schoolteacher, and a quiet man who keeps odd hours — and praying three months' rent will hold the roof up.

Then a neighbor's little boy disappears. Oskar Leszek is Tommy's age. The police close the file. The politicians look the other way. And Maggie, who has spent her widowhood trying very hard not to be noticed, finds she cannot let this one go.

She has no training, no authority, and no allies — except the one nobody else can see. Inspector Frank Geyer has been dead for years, and being dead has not stopped him from being a policeman. He knows how a case is built. She knows how a neighborhood talks.

But Prohibition has remade Philadelphia. Bootleggers are the boys from down the street. Police have gone into business for themselves. And the warmest woman Maggie meets is Edith Duffy — whose husband Mickey is the most dangerous man in the city.

Some choices aren't between right and wrong. They're between the people you've come to love and the truth you can no longer unknow.

Innocence Lost is the first novel in the Bootleggers' Chronicles, a historical mystery series set in Prohibition-era Philadelphia. For readers who love resilient women, meticulously researched history, and just a touch of the uncanny.