The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

0 ratings • 0 reviews • 1 shelved
Book cover for The Black Hand

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

Discover the truth about the Black Hand, as featured in Peaky Blinders

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. The crimes whipped up the slavering tabloid press and heated ethnic tensions to the boiling point.

Standing between the American public and the Black Hand’s lawlessness was Joseph Petrosino. Dubbed the “Italian Sherlock Holmes,” he was a famously dogged and ingenious detective, and a master of disguise. As the crimes grew ever more bizarre and the Black Hand’s activities spread far beyond New York’s borders, Petrosino and the all-Italian police squad he assembled raced to capture members of the secret criminal society before the country’s anti-immigrant tremors exploded into catastrophe. Petrosino’s quest to root out the source of the Black Hand’s power would take him all the way to Sicily—but at a terrible cost.

Unfolding a story rich with resonance in our own era, The Black Hand is fast-paced narrative history at its very best.

  • ISBN10 1785037129
  • ISBN13 9781785037122
  • Publish Date 27 April 2017 (first published 25 April 2017)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Ebury Publishing
  • Imprint Ebury Press
  • Format Paperback (UK Trade)
  • Pages 320
  • Language English