Murder Knocks Twice (Speakeasy Mysteries #1) by Susanna Calkins

In 1929 Chicago, Gina Ricci is the newly hired cigarette girl at the Speakeasy known as The Third Door. It’s not her ideal job but she is struggling to earn money for her ailing father and so she casts her concerns aside and plunges into the job. But when she learns the girl she replaced was actually murdered, her concerns mount. And then a photographer, hired by the speakeasy to take pictures of customers having good times with celebrities, is murdered right in front of her. His dying words to Gina are to safeguard his camera at all costs.

I thoroughly enjoyed this historical mystery. The setting of a 1920s Chicago speakeasy was enough to draw me in and that setting along with the colorful characters and the page-turning mystery plot kept me reading right past my bedtime. Gina makes for a nice amateur sleuth, more the type that finds herself in a tough situation than the poking-her-nose-in-where-it-doesn't-belong type. The atmosphere was great, with the spot-on language of the depression, the ongoing prohibition enforcement efforts, all on the edge of the mobster scene. Various celebrities like Clarence Darrow, Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig, and several references to Al Capone pepper the scenery. This is not a hard-boiled crime novel by any means but it's not exactly a cozy either. Everything was just as I hoped for when I first picked up this book and considered it to read.

This is the first mystery I’ve read by this author but I already have book #2 on my TBR list and may well pursue her Lucy Campion series as well.