Chicago 1922 — Chicago Tribune reporter, Garland Hopkins, is a high-ender from his brown derby down to his cap-toe Oxfords. Besides being wealthy, he's clever as a fox covering the news, but he has a weakness, the wicked women and jazz down on The Stroll, South State Street's famous strip of clubs.

Esther Allen is exactly that. A caramel-skinned, mixed-race beauty, who works The Stroll as a gossip girl and legman reporter for a jazz news weekly, she's all guile and guts. And she wants more. When Esther smiles and purrs at Garland to learn his next move, she ends up in the dangerous tenements of gangster-controlled Little Italy. Esther's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Esther's gone.

A fire-haired Scottish woman and speakeasy owner who'd bite the horns off Lucifer himself, an impossibly brilliant secretary and a flat-faced ex-cop help Garland go up against Little Italy's ruthless criminals, flesh-peddlers and traffickers in a race against time.

Nothing and no one is quite as it seems in Chicago's Little Italy