It's 1933, the world premiere of King Kong , and Fay Wray has come to Jimmy Quinn for help. She received an extortion threat with a set of sexually explicit photographs of a woman who resembles her, and if the studio doesn't pay up, copies will be sent to all the gossip columnists. The pictures appear to have been made with costumes and sets from the film, so RKO executives, with the cooperation of a slightly corrupt NYPD detective, want the matter settled quietly. For Jimmy, the matter actually began two years earlier, in the summer of 1931, when he helped Charlie Luciano take over the Italian mob by getting rid of boss Salvatore Maranzano. At the same time, Miss Wray was in town to make her Broadway debut in a play written by her husband, John Monk Saunders, who wanted to have "the full New York speakeasy experience." Jimmy's old friend Polly Adler, the city's most notorious and popular madam, also had a role to play. So did Meyer Lansky. For Jimmy to save Miss Wray, he'll need to deal with an act of shocking brutality in a midtown office building; an empty Fifth Avenue mansion; an exotic pornographer and his concubi≠ a secret upper crust "film society"; a movie studio hidden so deep in Chinatown that "no white man could find it"; and long-hidden sexual abuse within one of the city's most powerful families.