I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Nancy Bilyeau – her Joanna Stafford Tudor Trilogy, her two Genevieve Planché thrillers set in the world of 18th century art, and Dreamland, her novel about a Coney Island theme park – so I couldn’t wait to start reading her new book, The Orchid Hour. The setting sounded intriguing: New York’s Little Italy during the 1920s, the Prohibition Era, so I was anticipating another good read.

The novel opens in 1923 and introduces us to Audenzia de Luca, known as Zia, a young Sicilian woman whose husband was killed in the Great War. Zia is trying to build a new life for herself and her son and has started working at the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library while also helping out in her in-laws’ cheese shop in Little Italy. At work one day, she is approached by a regular visitor to the library who asks if she could translate an Italian text into English for him. Zia agrees, but before she can begin the task, the man is found shot dead outside the library.

When a second murder follows the first, a sequence of events is set in motion that leads Zia to the doors of The Orchid Hour, an elegant nightclub that also operates as a speakeasy, selling illicit alcohol in defiance of Prohibition. With the police investigation into the murders going nowhere, Zia decides to do whatever she can to uncover the truth. She believes The Orchid Hour holds the key to the mystery but when she discovers that her cousin Salvatore, to whom she is very close, is mixed up with the criminal underworld, she must find a way to bring the killer – or killers – to justice without endangering her own loved ones.

This is not my favourite of Nancy Bilyeau’s books, but with such a range of plots and settings, it’s inevitable that I’ll like some of them more than others and this was still a very enjoyable novel. It was interesting to read about Zia and her family and I found that I was learning a lot about the lives of Italian immigrants in 1920s New York, the way they were treated and the type of jobs open to them, as well as the constant threat of the Society of the Black Hand, who extorted protection money from their fellow Italians. The novel also explores other issues, such as attitudes towards Prohibition and why the police would sometimes turn a blind eye, and the best conditions for growing delicate orchids. Bilyeau’s Author’s Note at the end of the book describes some of her research and sources and tells us which of the characters were fictional and which were based on real people.

I found the mystery element of the book slightly less successful, particularly as several chapters are written from the perspective of one of the gangsters, so we knew who was involved in at least one of the murders right from the beginning. Still, I enjoyed this book for the historical detail and because it immersed me in a world I previously knew very little about.

Thanks to Lume Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 31/50 for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.