Fourteen-year-old Carsie Akselrod and her younger sister, Lilia, flee the Russian pogroms to live with relatives on New York's teeming, dangerous Lower East Side. Like many Jewish immigrant Americans in the early 1900s, the girls go to work in sweatshops, eventually taking jobs at the ill-fated Triangle Waist Company, scene of the infamous 1911 industrial fire that claimed the lives of 146 garment workers. Set against Tammany Hall politics and gangland crime, City of Slaughter is a tale of a woman torn by family, faith, and her drive to rise from poverty, succeed in business, and claim her place in New York's world of fashion and society.