Told in quick, sharp scenes that slice to the bone even as they leap across years and perspectives, this swift, sprawling epic of organized Irish crime in American cities blazes through the Gilded Age and the early 20th century, after a haunting prologue in the Five Points era. Konvitz (author of The Sentinel) blends history and fiction at the pace of a film montage, surveying the entwining of vice and political power in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. Amid a welter of historical and fictional personages, from the bosses at Tammany Hall to New York Mayor William J. Gaynor, whose refusal, in 1910, to play ball with the Tammany machine will spur the invented thug-on-the-come-up Thomas Monaghan to assemble the “Tenderloin vice interests, the Irish fraternal orders, and our friends at the Archdiocese,” asking, “Gaynor wants war? He’ll have war.”

 

Konvitz writes that war with brutal imaginative power—"One eye severed, his face ravaged with glass, Banjo Frank rocketed back into McGuinness.” Still, *The Circus of Satan*, named for the stretch of midtown Manhattan then known as the Tenderloin, is as concerned with the heart and the conscience as it is with when “Tricker had Eat-’Em-Up’s skull crushed.” In delightful early scenes, protagonist Billy McGuinness, a boxer too old to take punches anymore, is enticed away from his profitable Mississippi River gambling boat by his love for a “Bible-toting prohibitionist.”

 

McGuinness, of course, soon is back in the life, but as Monaghan’s war heats up, and times and cities change, McGuinness’s conscience will shape the “lives of almost everyone involved and inseminate the seed of American organized crime.” Konvitz’s storytelling offers brisk glimpses of significant moments—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Chicago’s First Ward Balls—as seen by many interested parties, challenging readers to keep up. The hefty length and fractured focus won’t be to all tastes, but Konvitz offers pulp vigor, sharp scenecraft, historical insight, and reportorial integrity.