Riley and the Roaring Twenties
Riley and the Roaring Twenties
| Riley Series |
James Anderson O’Neal
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softcover 978-1-988915-04-3
ON SALE
fiction · 316 PP · 5½×8½"
$19.95 USD · $23.95 CAD
Shortlisted for the Goethe Book Awards for post-1750s Historical Fiction
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Speak easy.
Prohibition-era New York swims in a sea of illegal booze and it seems like the party will never end. Even so, dark deeds and bad men lurk behind the good life. Freshly returned from Europe’s conflicts, strong and silent Riley wants to rush back to the farm but smooth-talker Cornelius aspires to a new life. As a crime reporter amidst the city’s icons, from the Algonquin Round Table’s glitterati to the seedy underbelly where deals get done and so do people, Cornelius takes a deadly ringside seat for the unveiling of plans that will change the future of organized crime.
Back in Missouri, the daughter he’s never seen and a son whose father has yet to come home give Riley the strength to resist the siren call of adventure, though dark scars from the past threaten to surface. When tragedy strikes close to home and Cornelius falls into the clutches of a criminal mastermind, Riley heads east to settle accounts.
The city that never sleeps had better watch out.
Riley and Cornelius are back! Still traipsing through the 20th Century, they stumble across the secrets behind three of its great unsolved mysteries along the way. Dorothy Parker, Al Capone, Damon Runyon, Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, J.P. Morgan, Albert Anastasia, and a Marx brother or two — any one of them might make the difference between life and death for our duo.
Review quotes:
“O’Neal drew me in. His 1920s story of gangsters, gambling, and murder left me hungry for the next Riley story.”
— Dean Hovey, award-winning author of the Pine County mysteries