The vapors A southern family, the New York mob, and the rise and fall of Hot Springs, America's forgotten capital of vice

Deep in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas lies a town with a dynamic past. With its connection to geothermally heated groundwater, Hot Springs became an attractive tourist destination in the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1930s, however, curative waters played a smaller role in bringing people to this Southern spa town. Journalist Hill's first book explores another side of Hot Springs, as a mecca for drinking and gambling. Digging into the town's strong connection to East Coast and Midwest Mafia organizations, Hill uncovers how gambling could thrive in Hot Springs for decades despite state and federal laws forbidding it. While exposing the unique local culture of bribery, racketeering, and graft--all conducted with a dose of Southern charm--Hill takes up his family's own Hot Springs history, telling the story of his paternal grandmother, Hazel, who got caught up in the seeming glitz and glamour of a casino-town lifestyle. Readers who enjoy stories of organized crime and political maneuvering will be attracted to this well-researched history.

Journalist Hill's fantastic debut blends true crime and Southern history to chronicle the transformation of Hot Springs, Ark., from a spa town into a hotbed of horse racing, prostitution, and illegal gambling between the 1930s and 1960s. Hill tracks the history through the lives of three central figures: Owney Madden, Dane Harris, and Hazel Hill (the author's grandmother). Madden, an Irish-American gangster and owner of the Cotton Club in Harlem, moved to Hot Springs in 1935 to avoid enemies he'd made in the Manhattan underworld. He teamed with local hustlers, including bootlegger Harris, to turn the town's existing vice district into a strip of high-end resorts that drew professional athletes and film stars. Harris and Madden also opened the Vapors, the grandest of the city's resorts, where Hazel Hill worked as a "shill player," betting with house money "to keep the tourists interested and the games going," while struggling to raise three children on her own after leaving their abusive, alcoholic father. Expertly interweaving family memoir, Arkansas politics, and Mafia lore, Hill packs the story full of colorful characters and hair-raising events. This novelistic history hits the jackpot. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)

The history of a small town in Arkansas that once rivaled Las Vegas in gambling, booze, and prostitution. For most Americans, Hot Springs, Arkansas, doesn't raise an eyebrow, but folks who lived in the state from the 1930s to the '60s knew the place as "the most sinful little city in the world." In his first book, Hill, a Brooklyn-based journalist from Hot Springs, tells a juicy tale of how such a place was born and stayed in business for so long as the "sin city of the Bible Belt." Due to the Vapors, therapeutic, thermal springs offering relief to those in pain, the area "was the first park to be managed by the federal government." The author offers up a huge cast of colorful, mostly sleazy characters, but he focuses on three key players: Hazel Hill, the author's grandmother; gangster Dane Harris, boss gambler and the "most powerful man in Hot Springs"; and Owney "The Killer" Madden, who was sent to the town in 1931 by Meyer Lansky to be the "mob's ambassador." Weaving their stories in and out, from 1931 to 1968, Hill unfolds an engrossing history of corruption at the highest levels. During World War II, Hot Springs and its excellent hospital became a refuge for soldiers seeking much-needed R & R, enjoying the illegal booze, and gambling. Madden consolidated power, teaming up with Harris. Struggling to raise her family of three sons, including Jimmy, the author's father, Hazel moved from Ohio back to Hot Springs in 1951 and got a job as a barmaid and, later, a "shill player" at a casino, gambling with the house's money. In highly detailed, novelistic prose, Hill chronicles the rise of the power brokers and their ballot-stuffing control of local and state elections. In 1965, J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy finally shut it all down. A captivating, shady story about massive, brazen corruption hiding in plain sight. (8 pages of b/w illustrations) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.