Butchertown

Paul Bacon ex-Navy boxer and fun-loving Jazz-Age fashion plate moved to 1920s California for the endless sunshine oranges and bright white beaches. But all he finds is loneliness and misery in the chilly fog-choked canyons of San Francisco.One night homesick and miserable he meets and falls for Molly Carver a mysterious beauty who lures him on a romantic weekend escapade across the Bay to her hometown of Evansville. There she promises he will find the California promised by the travel brochures.Mollys promise turns out to be camouflage for a dangerous game. Evansville is no paradise but a whirling sewer of slaughterhouses oil refineries factories and dens of Prohibition iniquity. After stumbling across the brutal murder of Mollys brother Paul must fight for his life while caught in the crossfire of a bloody gang war over the towns teeming vice rackets. and playing diplomat-at-gunpoint between the two warring factions. If he wants to get out alive hed better find the path to peace between two groups who know little of it.They dont call it Butchertown for nothing.Set in the early years of Prohibition and the Roaring 20s Butchertown is a bullet-packed tale populated by scheming ambitious bootleggers trigger-happy gangsters devious molls and even a pair of fanatic Prohibitionists--one of them an old flame of Pauls--raging to force their ideals on a fallen unwilling world.Butchertown is also the story of a softboiled guy trapped in a hardboiled world the hair-raising adventure of a callow but decent young man as he desperately tries to forge a sensible peace out of an insensible situation. As Paul Bacon is pulled deeper into Butchertowns bloody whirlpool down to the secrets lurking at its heart he also comes to wonder if the new world of the twentieth century is one people can live in.