For fans of The Knick, The Alienist, and The Last Days of
Night, an entertaining, atmospheric crime thriller set in the Gilded
Age.
New York, August 1896. A "hot wave" has settled on the city with no end
in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead
horses felled by the heat. In this presidential election year, the gulf
between rich and poor has political passions flaring, while
anti-immigrant sentiment has turned virulent. At Police Headquarters,
the gruff, politically ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has
been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department. Meanwhile,
the yellow press is ready to pounce on the peccadilloes of the Four
Hundred, the city's social elite--the better to sell papers with lurid
stories and gossip or perhaps profit from a little blackmail on the
side. When the body of Town Topics publisher William d'Alton Mann is
found at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, any number of his
ink-spattered victims may have a motive.
Hot Time is an immensely entertaining, deeply researched, and richly
textured historical novel set in a period that reflects our own, with
cameos by figures ranging from financier J. P. Morgan to muckraking
journalist Jacob Riis. Our guides through New York's torrid, bustling
streets are Otto "Rafe" Raphael from the Lower East Side, one of the
first Jewish officers in the heavily Irish force, who finds as many
enemies within the department as outside it; Minnie Kelly, the
department's first female stenographer; Theodore Roosevelt himself; and
the plucky orphan Dutch, one of the city's thousands of newsboys, who
may have seen too much.
