Synopsis "Dance Hall: A Novel of Sing Sing"
INSPIRED BY TRUE STORIES OF DEPRESSION-ERA SING SINGA Brooklyn stickup artist, his taxi-dancing wife, a murderous newspaperman, a risk-taking warden, and a wife with a dark past converge in 1930s Sing Sing heading toward death, redemption-and Ebbets Field. Award-winning author David Pietrusza's Dance Hall: A Novel of Sing Sing unveils a grand and riveting tale of a violent and desperate era, unforgettably narrated in a gripping, often wry, fashion-recorded in tears and punctuated in-rarely innocent-blood. Dance Hall dramatically transports readers to a seedy, volatile 1930s underworld where love and honor and redemption jostle for mere survival with greed and lust and betrayal. Dance Hall unveils the story of a down-on-his-luck Brooklyn stickup artist, his taxi-dancing Filipina spouse, a murderous newspaperman, a risk-taking warden, and a wife with a dark past converging in Sing Sing, destined for love, death, forgiveness, redemption-and Ebbets Field. Dance Hall is so much more than just a heart-pounding crime thriller: it's also an intricate, finely-crafted interweaving of unforgettable characters: a young parish priest gone wrong and then right again, a brutal Bowery killer with escape on his mind, a con man with the vestige of a conscience, a thuggish Garment District goon with a devout sister, a tell-all Broadway gossip columnist with the power to make or break anyone, a rat of an accomplice, a once-disgraced private detective who now surprisingly elevates a principle above a paycheck. Dive into Dance Hall and you live and breathe life inside cold and desperate prison cells; sweaty and often violent Brooklyn dime-a-dance dance halls; crowded tenements, back-alley speakeasies where anything and anybody was for sale; the elegant bastions of the rich and powerful; and of a waiting area for Sing Sing's "Death Row" called "The Dance Hall"-all the while returning you to Depression days when hope reigned supreme. Because hope was all you had.
