Information about the author
Christine Wiltz is the author of four novels. She lives in her native New Orleans.

Summary
In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she recorded her memories—the scandalous stories of a powerful woman who had the city's politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the twenty-five-year-old boy next door, whom she married when she was sixty-four. Combining those recordings with original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles not just Norma's rise and fall but also the social history of New Orleans, thick with vice and corruption.