Little Underworld

Chinatown meets the Coen brothers in 1930s Omaha in this atmospheric noir by a native Nebraskan.

Omaha, 1930. PI Jim Beely’s life wasn’t a peach to begin with. And now there’s a dead guy in his backseat. The last thing he needs to deal with is a cop--much less the notoriously crooked Frank Tvrdik. But where a square-dealing lawman would see homicide, Frank spots opportunity. He can make the body disappear. All Jim needs to do is double-cross a politician bent on shuttering Omaha’s speakeasies, some of the few places to make an illegal, honest living in a city that’s a racket.

After the double-cross goes haywire, Jim gets his bell rung in a bizarre attack. A man on his payroll turns up dead. And Jim and Frank form an unlikely alliance, digging for the reality behind patently false headlines. They comb the city’s bordellos, gin joints, and gambling houses. They search for answers in the fun-house mirror of Omaha politics. All the while, the death toll mounts, outmatched only by the absurdity of it all.

As the clock runs down, Jim and Frank must make a choice that can’t be unmade. One that leaves them asking what it means to be good. And how the hell you go on living when you’re not. Laying bare historical myth and political corruption, Chris Harding Thornton’s Little Underworld is a searing, darkly funny novel and a ferocious romp through a world not so distant from our own.

Chris Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, is the author of Pickard County Atlas. She has worked as a quality assurance overseer at a condom factory, a jar-lid screwer at a plastics plant, a closer at Burger King, a record store clerk, an all-ages club manager, a PR writer, and a teacher of writing and literature. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. She lives in Wahoo, Nebraska.