Author(s): Krist Gary

American History

Empire of Sin is a vibrant account of New Orleans in the early 1920s, a time when commercialised vice, jazz culture and endemic crime form the background for a civil war that lasts for thirty years. At its centre the city's vice lord fights desperately to keep his empire intact. Populated by flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen, ruthless Mafiosi, corrupt politicians and a violent serial killer, the heady and dangerous underworld of the Jazz Age is bought vividly to life in Empire of Sin. This gripping account intertwines personal stories with the wider history of New Orleans and plunges the reader into the heart of a city at war with itself.