DOE (The Doe Ledger)

Mid-century Chicago. The men who run the rackets answer, when they are summoned, to a woman on the eleventh floor — a woman whose name appears on no ledger, whose knife carries a notch in the spine that Capone's surviving men still talk about, and whose office men leave understanding exactly whose town they live in.Her name is Ruth. This is the story of how she was built.Left at an orphanage on Polk Street in 1916, by a mother whose reasons she would never learn, she was sweeping slaughterhouse floors at nine — and studying fighters across the city who never knew they were teaching her. A Filipino crate-hauler with four blades and a grandfather's patience saw what she was before she did, and showed her the knife. What she made of all of it, patiently, exactly, was not a gang. It was an institution: the bookkeeper, the blade, the soldier, the heir — a family, assembled the way everything in her life was assembled. On purpose.DOE is the first book of a saga — a literary crime novel about power, fear, and what it costs to build yourself from nothing: the story of a girl who decided, at twelve, to be worth the decision her mother made, and of the woman who spent a lifetime collecting.For readers of Mario Puzo's The Godfather and Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. Read more