Party Like It’s Prohibition: Historical Fiction of the ’20s

A film student interviewing 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, a woman he believes rubbed elbows with Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux in her time as a dancer in 1920s Chicago. But the Chicago of one hundred years ago wasn’t just full of flappers in glittering dresses and strong drinks, it was also a time of mobsters and murder. And Honoree isn’t sure she ready to let go of all her old secrets.

Based on the life of legendary performer, activist, and spy, Josephine Baker’s Last Dance brings her incredible story to life. The novel begins with her early years impoverished in America and follows her rise to fame as a showgirl, showcasing her enduring spirit and passion for equality.

In 1921, mobs of white residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma attacked Black residents and destroyed more than 25 square blocks of one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the United States at the time, so wealthy, in fact, it was also known as “Black Wall Street.” When a seventeen-year-old girl in present day discovers a skeleton on her family’s property, she has no idea the history it will reveal. Told in a dual timeline, following a twenty-first-century biracial Black teen and a white and Native teen, forced to make difficult choices on the night of the Tulsa massacre.

Murders are happening left and right in 1920s Harlem, and young Black girls like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. She’s doing her best to stay alive, though, spending her days working at a café and her nights at Manhattan’s hottest speakeasy. But then a body is found at the café and Louise is arrested with an ultimatum: help the police solve the murders or be made an example of by the judge. Now Louise is stuck between the law and a murderous mastermind in a deadly game of cat and mouse.