Philadelphia, 1931. The party is over.
The Roaring Twenties left the city with a headache and a Depression. Men who had steady work a year ago now walk the pavement all day for nothing. Savings are gone. Credit at the corner store is gone. Just about the only business in Philadelphia still turning a profit belongs to Mickey Duffy.
Maggie Barnes is a long way from the widow who took in lodgers to keep a roof over her son's head. She has an accounting practice, a mortgage paid off in full, and a boy who is nearly grown and asks harder questions than he used to. She has also just buried her father — ten years estranged, and reconciled barely in time.
Seven years she has been working to bring Mickey Duffy down. She has never been closer. She has never been more tired.
And Inspector Frank Geyer, who has walked this city as a ghost without ever understanding why he stayed, has finally begun to ask about his own family. The trail leads back to a May night in 1844, when Philadelphia's volunteer firemen brawled in the street for the right to a fire plug while a church burned to the ground and a boy named Geyer ran through the smoke.
Philadelphia has been making men like Mickey Duffy for a hundred years. Frank is about to discover just how personally.
Come at the king, and you had best not miss.
Come at the King is the fifth and final novel in the Bootleggers' Chronicles, a historical mystery series set in Prohibition-era Philadelphia. For readers who love resourceful women, a partnership worth rooting for, and an ending that has been seven books in the making.
