Discusses Prohibition in the United States, including why it was enacted, its effects on the people and the nation, its connection with criminal activity, and its repeal.

"Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets—and has a high old time doing it! So will you."—Ann B. Ross, New York Times bestselling author of the Miss Julia series
Former socialite Lola Woodby is now struggling to make ends meet as a not-so-discreet private eye in Prohibtion-era New York City, along with her stern Swedish sidekick, Berta. When they're offered a piece-of-cake job—retrieving a rhinoceros trophy from the Connecticut

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Prohibition has long been portrayed as a znoble experimenty that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar...

Explores the impact on American society and history of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, which prohibited any use of alcohol except for religious or medicinal purposes.

"In early 1930s Montana, in the small town of Colton, Maddy Aldridge struggles to make ends meet during the Great Depression. With her mother long dead, her stubborn younger sister fighting her at every turn, and her father's arthritis deteriorating so badly that she has to run the family store alone, her desperation grows by the day. Enter Jeffers Grimm with a proposition too great for her to turn down: open an illegal speakeasy in the mercantile's...

"It is 1921, and both Prohibition and bootlegging are in full swing. When Isaac Bell's boss and lifelong friend Joseph Van Dorn is shot and nearly killed leading the high-speed chase of a rum-running vessel, Bell swears to him that he will hunt down the lawbreakers, but he doesn't know what he is getting into. When a witness to Van Dorn's shooting is executed in a ruthlessly efficient manner invented by the Russian secret police, it becomes clear...

"Washington, DC, 1926. While sorcery opponents have succeeded in passing the 18th Amendment, the Prohibition of magic has only invigorated the city's underworld. Smuggling rings funnel magic contraband in from the coast. Sorcerers cast illusions to aid mobsters' crime sprees. Gangs have even established secret venues called "magic havens," where the public can lose themselves in immersive magic, as well as imbibe a mind-bending and highly addictive...

It's the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition hasn't stopped the flow of booze in an underground network of gangster-run speakeasies. The opportunity to gain power and money is there for any man with enough nerve, and Joe Coughlin, the son of the Boston Police superintendent, long ago turned his back on his strict upbringing for the spoils of being an outlaw. But even among criminals there are rules, and Joe breaks a big one: crossing a powerful mob boss...