Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder and the Battle for New Orleans - Tapa dura

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.

Gary Krist has written for the New York Times, Esquire, the Washington Post Book World, and elsewhere. He is the author of the bestselling City of Scoundrels and the acclaimed The White Cascade, as well as several works of fiction. He has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for Travel Journalism, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.