It's New Year’s Eve 1928, at the height of the roaring twenties in Prohibition America. The sale, possession and consumption of alcohol is illegal, but the taps are still pouring. Fellas and flappers are revelling to the sound of jazz in speakeasies all over town, drinking ‘giggle-water’ and dancing the Charleston. Prohibition has given rise to the bootlegging business, and nobody does it better than notorious crime boss Mitzy Malone. Mitzy is ‘untouchable’, with politicians, cops and clubs all in her pocket.
That's until the Batch 888 tragedy, when 121 people drop dead at a speakeasy in town, poisoned by bootlegged liquor cut with industrial alcohol. The word on the street is that the bad hooch came from Mitzy’s gang, but any evidence or witnesses mysteriously ‘disappear’. Fear begins to spread throughout town like hot embers over dry kindling; there are rumours of a ‘snitch’ grassing on all those complicit in bootlegging, rival bootleggers are jostling to replace Mitzy as the ‘big cheese’, and alliances between moonshiners, the cops and politicians are fraught. Nobody trusts nobody.
Tonight, you’re going to the Last Orders speakeasy for a glitzy New Year's Eve party, made even more hedonistic by the fact that it’s the only joint in town yet to be raided. But it’s not all fun and games; everyone is sure to be on the lookout for the mysterious ‘snitch’, and watching their backs as the fraught atmosphere after Batch 888 threatens to ignite into an all-out mob war.
