Girl from Farris's

In 1916 Chicago, a young woman escapes the gilded cage of Farris's, one of the city's most exclusive brothels, trading luxury for a rented room in the slums where the rent is late and the winters are cruel. This is not the Tarzan jungle, but something rarer from Edgar Rice Burroughs: a descent into the urban underworld, where survival means scrubbing floors, dodging detectives, and watching every man wonder if you're what they think you are. Running parallel is the story of Billy, a businessman whose fiancée and partners systematically dismantle everything he's built, stripping him from wealth to want. Their paths will cross, but whether that collision brings salvation or ruin remains the question that drives this overlooked novel forward. Burroughs wrote this as a deliberate departure from his adventure fantasies, aiming for something raw and real. The result is a book that feels startlingly contemporary, concerned not with distant jungles but with the daily violence of poverty, the impossibility of escaping your past, and the question of whether redemption is possible when society has already rendered its verdict.