From the jacket blurb:

THE UNDERWORLD is filled with violence and lust and evil and the desperate struggle of men to stay alive in a man made jungle, of their women trying to fulfill their loves.

It all centers about the octopus-like numbers racket in New York, and the master-minds and stooges caught up in it. But the far-reaching tentacles of the racket extend into the lives of many men and women in the teeming cityinnocent and guilty alike. To them it brings sudden riches or sudden poverty, love or heartbreak, and sometimes violent death.

Meet Leo Minch, who got into the racket by being honest; Frederick Bauer, who never knew why he got into it; Mrs. Bauer, who waited frightened in the night; Doris, the glamorous show-girl who was swept into the whirlpool. And meet Tucker - quiet, mysterious, powerful Tucker, the head of the racket, whose word was law in a world beyond the law.

You hold in your hands not just a book but the pulsing, passionate lives of a score of sensual, greedy, hating, scared, vicious, vital human beings!

"Action and melodrama to satisfy the most avid crime story addict. But this is no mere crime story. It is a penetrating and sympathetic novel." -- Saturday Review

Document URL: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/tucker-blurb.html
Last modified: Thursday, 31-May-2007 09:41:36 EDT