The Velvet Hour
(2026)(The first book in the Jazz Age Christmas Mysteries series)
A novel by Sherilyn Decter
This is not the speakeasy from the movies.
No chrome, no chorus girls, no gangster in a white tuxedo. The Velvet Hour is two warm rooms at the top of a narrow stair on Rush Street, hidden above a flower shop, furnished out of estate sales and lit like somebody's grandfather's club. The flashy joints got raided. This one simply kept going — and kept its people: Joseph the old bartender, Mrs. Birch in the kitchen, Della on the little stage, and Ruth Ellery, the widow who balances the books and tells herself she's only passing through until she can take her daughter back to Cleveland.
Chicago, Christmas 1927. The owner is in a hospital bed with a bullet in him. Eleven thousand dollars has gone out of the books that Ruth keeps. And the day after Christmas, Capone's accountants will sit down at the back table and start reading.
There's no inspector to call and no one to send. There's only Ruth — a tired woman with reading glasses and an unforgiving head for figures — sixty hours, and a nine-year-old at her side who notices everything. To find the thief, she'll have to look hard at the people she works beside every night. To save them, she'll have to stop pretending they were ever just coworkers.
A warm, working-class Christmas mystery set in Prohibition-era Chicago — a found-family story with a clock ticking under it. For readers who want their holiday fiction with a little snow, a little danger, and a great deal of heart.
For readers of Hazel Gaynor, Susan Meissner, and Jennifer Ryan.
Genre: Mystery
No chrome, no chorus girls, no gangster in a white tuxedo. The Velvet Hour is two warm rooms at the top of a narrow stair on Rush Street, hidden above a flower shop, furnished out of estate sales and lit like somebody's grandfather's club. The flashy joints got raided. This one simply kept going — and kept its people: Joseph the old bartender, Mrs. Birch in the kitchen, Della on the little stage, and Ruth Ellery, the widow who balances the books and tells herself she's only passing through until she can take her daughter back to Cleveland.
Chicago, Christmas 1927. The owner is in a hospital bed with a bullet in him. Eleven thousand dollars has gone out of the books that Ruth keeps. And the day after Christmas, Capone's accountants will sit down at the back table and start reading.
There's no inspector to call and no one to send. There's only Ruth — a tired woman with reading glasses and an unforgiving head for figures — sixty hours, and a nine-year-old at her side who notices everything. To find the thief, she'll have to look hard at the people she works beside every night. To save them, she'll have to stop pretending they were ever just coworkers.
A warm, working-class Christmas mystery set in Prohibition-era Chicago — a found-family story with a clock ticking under it. For readers who want their holiday fiction with a little snow, a little danger, and a great deal of heart.
For readers of Hazel Gaynor, Susan Meissner, and Jennifer Ryan.
Genre: Mystery
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