Victoria Thompson — Thompson’s Gaslight Mysteries understand that a woman investigating crime in a man’s world is never just investigating crime — she’s navigating every assumption about what a woman should be doing with her time instead. Maggie Barnes in Tasting the Apple faces that same double bind: she’s good at undercover work, she needs the money, and nobody in her life is entirely comfortable with either fact.
Rhys Bowen — Bowen’s Molly Murphy is at her best when the personal stakes and the investigative stakes collide, when solving the case means risking the relationships she depends on. Tasting the Apple puts Maggie in exactly that position: her best friend is married to the man she’s trying to bring down, and the deeper she goes, the more she sees of Edith’s private pain.
Susan Meissner — for readers who want historical fiction where temptation isn’t melodrama but the quiet, daily arithmetic of compromise, Meissner’s layered emotional landscapes and Tasting the Apple are speaking the same language. Maggie’s temptation isn’t a single dramatic moment. It’s the mortgage payment she can’t make, the washing machine she can’t afford, and the man offering to make it all go away.
Tasting the Apple is the second of five novels following Maggie Barnes through Prohibition-era Philadelphia. Her story continues in Best Served Cold, where the war between Mickey Duffy and the Bailey Gang turns deadly.
New to the series? Maggie’s story begins in Innocence Lost, where a missing neighborhood boy and a dead detective’s ghost pull her into a fight she never planned on joining. Start with Innocence Lost
You’ve just watched Mickey and Edith’s marriage buckle under the weight of ambition, betrayal, and a city that won’t let either of them be who they used to be. But there was a night in Philadelphia — years before any of it — when they were just two people who didn’t know what was coming.
Destinations is where their story starts. Free for newsletter readers.
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The title is deliberate, and it runs through everything.
The apple is temptation — and in Tasting the Apple, everyone gets a bite. Maggie is tempted by Mickey’s offer to solve her financial problems. Edith is tempted by Tony Giordano and the escape he represents from a marriage that’s hollowing her out. Captain Copeland is tempted by the dream of leaving his corrupt double life for a clean start in Mickey’s organization — only to discover that Mickey needs him exactly where he is. Even Colonel Butler, in his final scene, admits that he’s spent thirty years as muscle for politicians who never cared about the principles he was fighting for.
The corruption racket depicted in the opening chapters — where Mickey’s crew delivers booze to a speakeasy, a detective immediately confiscates it, the owner pays the detective directly, and the same booze gets sold again the following week — is drawn from historical accounts of how Philadelphia’s protection rackets actually operated. The system was so efficient, and so openly understood, that Wednesday was literally known as collection day in parts of the city.
Colonel Smedley Butler’s departure from Philadelphia is historical. The real Butler was forced out by Mayor Kendrick under pressure from wealthy donors after Butler raided the Ritz-Carlton — exactly as depicted in the novel. Butler’s speech comparing himself to a racketeer for capitalism is drawn from his real writings, later published as War Is a Racket (1935), one of the most remarkable antiwar documents ever produced by a decorated American military officer.
The Bailey Gang is based on a real Philadelphia bootlegging family. Their arrival in Tasting the Apple — with Frankie and James offering their sister Delores to Mickey as leverage for a place in his crew — sets up the fracture that will drive the rest of the series. Readers of the Moonshiner Mysteries will recognize Delores Bailey as the woman she eventually becomes: the protagonist of that entire four-book series, a thousand miles and a lifetime away from the girl her brothers pushed toward Mickey Duffy’s table.
Edith’s treatment at the end of the novel — the malaria cure for syphilis — is historically accurate. Pyrotherapy, as it was known, involved deliberately infecting patients with malaria to induce fevers high enough to kill the syphilis bacteria. It was considered legitimate medicine in the 1920s and won its inventor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the Nobel Prize in 1927. It was brutal, dangerous, and sometimes it worked.
The young woman Frankie Bailey introduces to Mickey Duffy in this
book becomes one of Sherilyn Decter’s most beloved characters. Delores Bailey’s full story — how she got from Philadelphia to the Montana frontier, and what she built there — is told across four novels in the Moonshiner Mysteries. Meet the woman Delores becomes.
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