St. Paul was a haven for cons on the lam in the 1920s and ’30s. Bad guys across the country knew about the O’Connor system. A criminal could come to St. Paul, check in with police chief John O’Connor, and walk the streets openly, as long as he or she promised to stay clean. Ma Barker, Creepy Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson, and Machine Gun Kelley spent time in the cities. The system fell apart in the early ’30s, about the time that Dillinger shot his way out of his Summit Avenue apartment.

Across the river, Minneapolis has its own sordid story. By the turn of the twentieth century it was considered one of the most crooked cities in the nation. Mayor Albert Alonzo Ames, with the assistance of the chief of police, his brother Fred, ran a city so corrupt that according to Lincoln Steffans its “deliberateness, invention, and avarice has never been equaled.”

As recently as the mid-’90s, Minneapolis was called “Murderopolis” due to a rash of killings that occurred over a long hot summer.

Every city has its share of crime, but what makes the Twin Cities unique may be that we have more than our share of good writers to chronicle it. They are homegrown and they know the territory—how the cities look from the inside, out. Some have built reputations on crime fiction, others are playing with the genre for the first time, but all of them have a strong sense of this place and its people.

Bruce Rubenstein, Gary Bush, and Larry Millett illuminate the past—the Irish cops, politics, radicals, and mob guys.