The Black Hand

In the summer of 1903 a wave of crime that included kidnapping the children of Italian immigrants, shootings and bombings began in New York City and spread across the country, its only signature the mark of a black hand. Stephan Talty's narrative history follows Joseph Petrosino, a dogged detective and master of disguise nicknamed the Italian Sherlock Holmes, who assembled an all-Italian police squad to hunt the secret society behind the crimes. Threats reached judges, senators and Rockefellers, while the crimes stirred up the tabloid press and ethnic tensions, and anti-immigrant feeling grew. Petrosino's pursuit of the society's source of power eventually took him all the way to Sicily.

Officelovin' founder Michal Ptacek was reading it when interviewed, and described it as a book about the Italian mafia in early 20th-century New York.