Butchertown — Thomas Burchfield

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.

Molly's 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 Molly's brother, Paul must fight for his life while caught in the crossfire of a bloody gang war over the town's teeming vice rackets. and playing diplomat-at-gunpoint between the two warring factions. If he wants to get out alive, he'd better find the path to peace between two groups who know little of it.

They don't 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 Paul's -- 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 Butchertown's 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.