Pay attention to the preface of "The Bishop and the Butterfly," since it reveals to whom the title refers, but those nicknames barely recur in the rest of the book.

I had a handle on "Butterfly," even though that moniker is rarely used for con artist Vivian Gordon, whose 1931 murder connected her to then-governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other New York luminaries. But the "Bishop" appears so infrequently in the first half of Michael Wolraich's nonfiction book, subtitled "Murder, Politics and the End of the Jazz Age," that I forgot who he was.

That's due, I suspect, to the black-and-white cover of "Bishop" positioning it as true crime in the vein of Erik Larson's "The Devil in the White City," when it's really an absorbing history of the downfall of New York City's Tammany Hall political machine, with a splash of murder.

The bishop (Judge Samuel Seabury, who presided over Tammany's end) and butterfly are major figures in Wolraich's book, but it's not really about them. Instead, it thoroughly explores how Tammany ruled New York politics for the better part of a century and nearly prevented FDR from winning a couple of political offices on the way to his historic presidency.

Even though she's dead before "Bishop" begins, Gordon emerges fully formed in Wolraich's account. She was jailed for prostitution and her other unsavory activities included blackmail. But, in an era when some powerful men believed women were meant to be seen and not heard, it's clear that her conviction was the result of her husband's manipulations and that her permanent separation from her daughter was a tragic miscarriage of justice.

I'd read an entire book about Gordon and I'd love more on the atmosphere of the Jazz Age itself. But I was intrigued by Wolraich's account of Tammany and by the connections he makes between the politics of 100 years ago and 2024. There's a sense throughout the book that the world doesn't work so differently today and that we could be just one splashy murder away from a similar comeuppance.

"The Bishop and the Butterfly"

The Bishop and the Butterfly

By: Michael Wolraich.

Publisher: Union Square, 326 pages, $28.99.