The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress (#377) is Ariel Lawhon's juicy speculative novel about what could have happened in the real life 1930 case of New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater's disappearance. He vanished in a taxi cab from a New York City street one August evening and was never seen or heard from again. It was a case that gripped the American public's imagination for years.
In the New York City of 1930, it was a time of mobsters and showgirls, Cole Porter and Billie Holliday, jazz clubs and speakeasies. It was the perfect time and place for mob bosses like Owney Madden to run the town with the police in their pocket, and politicians owing them favors. It seems certain that Joseph Crater was one of those politicians who owed Owney Madden. After Crater disappeared, his wife Stella was suspected of having a hand in it, but it seems there could have been any number of likely suspects. It was a dangerous game they were all playing. The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress proposes one theory of what could have happened.
What does seem certain is that the Judge was mixed up in the graft and corruption of Tammany Hall, and that the witnesses due to testify before various commissions investigating sales of judgeships and other political influence peddling mysteriously disappeared themselves or were murdered. We'll probably never know the truth in this case, but it's an fascinating world to visit in this book.
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