A gripping novelization of one of the most colourful - and fateful - courtroom showdowns in US history, between special prosecutor Tom Dewey and Lucky Luciano, the Mob's ruling overlord
The year is 1936. Charles 'Lucky' Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor hired to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown - grifter, heroin addict, and sometimes prostitute - is the witness who claims she can do it. Only a wily defense attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, 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 their own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom, introducing America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organized crime and leaving the culture, laws, and politics of the nation changed forever.
Based on a trove of newly discovered documents, Tom & Lucky (and George & Cokey Flo) tells the gripping true story of a seminal trial in American history; an epic clash between a crime-busting district attorney and an all-powerful mob boss; a battle for the heart and soul of a dispirited nation; a portrait of a world where corruption rules and history remembers the villains.
About the Author
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.
Industry Reviews
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 * Independent *
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 * Sunday Times *
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 *
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 *
