Publisher's Synopsis
An adventure in Mafia baseball unfolds when almost at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties - with nearly the entire globe manning battle stations - Taddeo Villetti makes it out on to the mound for his first year with the World Series bound Chicago Cubs. And then to take his eye off the ball, Arlene arrives as a new sex-worker in his South Side crime family's bordello. She is secretly planted there to deliver a stunning victory for the North Side's Irish Mob and carries the revolver of her distant uncle, the infamous lawman Bat Masterson, with determined intent to bring her own permanent kind of Irish justice down upon the Italians who murdered her parents.
But life has a way of throwing some curve balls. As America's latest immigrants make their first attempt to recreate Cosa Nostra in the United States, a Jewish mob boss attempts to organize both the Italians and the Irish into the country's largest sports gambling racket which could possibly bring about a lasting peace, but is instead violently derailed by the forbidden romance in an ill-advised affair between Arlene and the Cubs' rookie pitcher. The young pair are fated to become star-crossed lovers as Taddeo sacrifices all to save Arlene from her life of slavery as a prostitute, with his jealous brothers playing a crippling game to thwart him at every turn. And all this before he ever suspects his obsessed-over love's true lethal purpose for being there, is to assassinate his entire family.
However, nothing can go as planned, when entering into this competition will be Arnold Rothstein, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone - while always fighting to stay alive, will be everyone's true buried values. And then the signal's given for the next player on-deck.
