Karen Abbott’s “Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” chronicles the opulent Everleigh Club, Chicago’s premier brothel, run by sisters Minna and Ada Everleigh in the early 1900s, which attracted elites amid the Levee district’s vice. It explores rival madams’ schemes, Progressive reformers’ crusades against “white slavery” leading to the Mann Act and the FBI, and the cultural clash shaping America’s moral landscape.

This e-book vividly captures scandal, ambition, and the perennial tension between hedonism and Puritanism in a transformative era.