When two sisters of indeterminate background, Ada and Minna Everleigh, arrived in Chicago in 1899, they did so with three intentions in mind: to open a brothel unequaled in its luxury by any other in America; to present prostitution as respectable, decent, and inevitable; and to get rich doing so. The madams and their eponymous club inarguably succeeded on the first and last points; it was the second that America's puritanical mores couldn't allow to happen. But the Everleigh Club's 11-year run as the classiest little whorehouse in Chicago was quite a ride, as Karen Abbott's lively, meticulous Sin in the Second City makes clear.

Turn-of-the-century Chicago — which has long been fertile literary territory — was a center of unprecedented, unregulated growth, with thousands of immigrants pouring in each day. As its population grew, so did Chicago's red-light district, known as the Levee. At its height, the Levee was home to more than 5,000 full-time prostitutes, housed in more than 1,000 different brothels. None was more admired — by johns for its courtesans; by working girls for its perquisites and pay — than the Everleigh, which featured a solid-gold piano, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art, some of the finest dining and champagne in Chicago, and girls who satisfied the "French" way.

But the Everleigh Club's heyday coincided with the reform-driven Progressive Era, and it is this clash of values that gives the book its narrative drive and its importance as a chronicle of a largely forgotten piece of American history. Reformers invoked the specter of "white slavery" and claimed that the city's brothels were filled with young women who had been kidnapped by nefarious pimps and madams and forced — having first been robbed of their chastity — into the life of a harlot. Several high-profile cases made clear that such stories were not the stuff of paranoid fantasy; but the truth, of course, was much more complicated. Women became prostitutes, then as now, for complex and various reasons, and the Everleighs, for their part, loved to point out that they turned girls away on a daily basis.

-Chris Parris-Lamb