Overview

FINALIST FOR THE HARPER LEE PRIZE FOR LEGAL FICTION 2016 FINALIST FOR THE MACAVITY AWARD 2016 The year is 1936. Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America, Mob overlord and bootlegger millionaire. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown – grifter, heroin addict and sometime prostitute – is the witness who claims she can do it. Only a wily defence attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, and between Dewey and the New York Governor’s mansion. As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom. The events of this seminal Mob trial will introduce America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organised crime, and leave its culture, laws and politics for ever changed.

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9781408868997

Table of Contents

Reviews

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mailer, Capote and Berendt, Greaves has crafted a McCarthy-esque non-fiction novelisation that is, at once, both timeless and classic. A truly extraordinary accomplishment, and a wonderful, wonderful book. I was left speechless R. J. Ellory on Hard Twisted A taut and intriguing thriller ... The novel displays Greaves's deft grasp of psychology ... Greaves's fictional version of her story is a strange and unsettling read Sunday Times Now and again you discover a thriller that sweeps you off your feet, it is so unexpected. This is one ... We are in the days of the dustbowls and The Grapes of Wrath ... A delicate mix of poignancy and horror, it is impossible to forget Daily Mail on Hard Twisted A superb first novel, based on a true story ... Written in a style that is the prose equivalent of a Dorothea Lange photograph ... Extraordinarily moving reading Guardian on Hard Twisted

A fast-paced collection of set-piece chapters that infuse popular-history with the wild energy of a 1930s Warner Bros. crime-movie. The novel’s prose-style shifts in tune to the events it chronicles, and we watch the protagonists change (if not quite grow), through experience and necessity, from youthful types into archetypes * Wall Street Journal * Fascinating * <b><i>Independent</i></b> * Meticulously researched … Jumps off the page * Guardian * A taut and intriguing thriller ... The novel displays Greaves’s deft grasp of psychology ... Greaves’s fictional version of her story is a strange and unsettling read * <i>Sunday Times</i> * Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mailer, Capote and Berendt, Greaves has crafted a McCarthy-esque non-fiction novelisation that is, at once, both timeless and classic. A truly extraordinary accomplishment, and a wonderful, wonderful book. I was left speechless * R. J. Ellory on <i>Hard Twisted</i> * Now and again you discover a thriller that sweeps you off your feet, it is so unexpected. This is one ... We are in the days of the dustbowls and The Grapes of Wrath ... A delicate mix of poignancy and horror, it is impossible to forget * <i>Daily Mail</i> on <i>Hard Twisted</i> * A superb first novel, based on a true story ... Written in a style that is the prose equivalent of a Dorothea Lange photograph ... Extraordinarily moving reading * <i>Guardian</i> on <i>Hard Twisted</i> *

Author Information

C. Joseph Greaves is a former L.A. trial lawyer now living in Colorado. His first novel, Hard Twisted, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in Fiction and was named Best Historical Novel in the SouthWest Writers’ International Writing Contest, in which Greaves was also honoured with the grand prize Storyteller Award. Writing as Chuck Greaves, he is a Shamus Award-finalist for his Jack MacTaggart series of legal/detective mysteries.

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