Feb 22, 2019
Innocence Lost by Sherilyn Decter is a story of Maggie Barnes, a widow with a young son to raise in Philadelphia, 1924. Maggie is finding is extremely difficult making ends meet including putting food on the table and paying the bills. She decides to open her house to guests, she has room for a few lodgers. One of the lodgers is Constable Joe Kelly, also living with her is Mr.Mansfield and Mr. Smith.
Her son Tommy is at a warehouse along with a few of his friends, where there are some bootleggers, led by Mickey Duffy. There is a police raid, they end up running and one of his friends, Oskar, goes missing. Tommy is scared and doesn’t say anything of what he knows about the raid and the missing boy. The boy is eventually found, in the river and this starts the investigation that Maggie finds herself in. Ironically, Maggie also becomes friends with Mickey Duffy’s wife Edith.
Prohibition was the norm in the ’20s, there were speakeasies all over Philadelphia. Maggie along with the help of Joe, they try to find and capture the bootleggers. Maggie also has another person helping her, a ghost of a Victorian cop, Inspector Frank Geyer. Their investigation into who and how Oskar died takes them into the world of gangsters and corruption.
I have not read a lot about Prohibition or gangsters, so I was a bit apprehensive because I like different genres in historical fiction, that said, I really enjoyed this book. There was a great amount of research done in this book, an ultimately the whole Bootlegger’s Chronicles. A fast and entertaining read. I highly recommend and look forward to reading the next in the series.