The Orchid Hour
1923 New York. Zia De Luca is a widow of the First World War. She and her young son live with her in-laws in the very close-knit community of Little Italy in Manhattan. She leads an uneventful life, working in a public library. Until the day she leaves as part of a cost-cutting exercise and an elderly man she barely knows, but who has confided in her, is murdered in front of the library.
Soon afterwards, her family is devastated when Zia’s father-in-law is shot dead by a collector of protection money – according to the police, that is. The police are known to be corrupt and prejudiced against Italians, and Zia is convinced they have the wrong man. She is determined to get to the bottom of both killings, believing they are linked. She uses her beloved but nefarious cousin, Salvatore, to get her a job at The Orchid Hour, one of many speakeasies that exist in this Prohibition era and which she is sure holds the clues she is looking for.
The book is mainly told from the first-person point of view of Zia, but there are also chapters telling the story of Lieutenant Frank Hudgins and Louis Buchalter. Frank is a decent policeman who wants to help Zia but is told to back off. Louis is a stooge of The Fixer, who has fingers in every criminal pie and who owns The Orchid Hour.
It took me a while to get into the book, and I don’t feel there is any real tension in it. It is, however, a good, well-researched and well-described novel, and I learned a lot about a place and era I hadn’t hitherto known much about.
