Want to be an armchair sleuth? Join fellow mystery lovers to read books from across the genre. Copies of each selection are available at the Circulation Desk approximately one month before the meeting.

The Mystery Book Club meets the last Thursday of every month at 3:00 P.M. We welcome all new members! Subscribe to the "Mystery Book Club" e-newsletter to receive book club reminders, updates, and meeting invitations.

This month’s selection is: The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox

"In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?

In the intervening years, "Marm" Mandelbaum had become the country's most notorious "fence"--a receiver of stolen goods--and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called "the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime," she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.

But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn't just a successful crook: She was a business visionary--one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains--turning theft into a viable, scalable business."