The word “cozy” is likely not what comes to mind when one thinks of bootleggers, brothels, gambling dens, and dusty crates of whiskey squirreled away in dark cellars. And yet Matt Goldman’s 11th novel, The Prohibited, earns that label with his historical family saga set in 1920s St. Paul, Minnesota.

There are enough characters in the sprawling cast to populate a limited Netflix series. The three Kaner brothers are the hub that all the others are connected to, and they’ve got problems. Middle brother Red is at odds with his wife, Ruth, because her allegiance as a suffragette aligned her with the dry movement, and the subsequent Prohibition meant the ruin of his liquor business. Their children, twins Rose and Willie, both have firm ideas about their futures, none of which comport with their father’s wishes. Red is a man of strict routine and self-imposed duty, and that feeling trickles down to his loved ones:

“if Red thought of his family in terms of running a business, he had neglected the customer service part of the job.”

Meanwhile, eldest Kaner brother Isaac is still reeling from the tragic loss of his wife and children years earlier and is now selling sacramental wine as a newly ordained rabbi. Youngest brother Lewis is the least troubled of all, determined to live a freer life than his father and brothers, content in a decades-old closeted relationship.

Goldman keeps the plot threads and characters coming, but the most central opens the book: Willie, having run afoul of a local bootlegger by setting up a side-hustle whiskey operation, fakes his own death and skips town in a plan orchestrated by Rose. He’s supposed to lay low but can’t resist the lure of easy money selling booze in a life where his charm has so far guaranteed an exit out of any scrape.

Rose is the opposite of her twin and one of the best characters in the book. Fierce, blunt, and a dead shot even from 200 yards away, she’s determined to control her own destiny. Defying her father’s blinkered wishes, sights set on the future she believes the soon-to-be-ratified 19th Amendment has promised her, she’s left home to save up money to attend medical school. She’s also trying not to think of Marco, a childhood sweetheart who happens to work for the same bootlegger who wants Willie dead. Her rationale:

“Better a broken heart than a broken life.”

Short scenes, precise action, and quick transitions make this tale zoom along with all the alacrity of a morning express train from Minneapolis to Chicago. But just like in a cozy mystery, though death is in the air, there’s no blood to be found, and the dangers that propel the plot largely diffuse into misunderstandings and coincidence. Mistakes that would be fatal in a Mario Puzo saga are forgiven and even inexplicably rewarded.

Goldman is also a playwright and writer for some iconic TV shows, and the tics of his performance-based work have made their way into The Prohibited. The writing is rife with sentence fragments and redundant descriptors. One wishes for an editor to have taken a red pen to sentences like these: “Saul doted on Ruth. Made a show of doting on Ruth. Created a beauty in Ruth” or “Emma and Red’s love went bad. It turned bitter. Acidic. Corrosive.”

Yet he can be a capable prose stylist, with a deft hand for poetically distilling his characters. The wannabe gangster Sherman “was just smart enough to know he wasn’t smart and that irritated him.” Isaac lives one floor below a piano teacher and listens in on lessons, observing that “Few of the kids had talent, but the simple, misplayed music offered him a hope he didn’t understand.” And when a woman removes her wedding ring, never to put it back on again:

“she set it on her plate as if it were a piece of gristle she had pulled from her mouth.”

Here’s the thing: Despite the language tics and head-scratching twists, The Prohibited is, well, fun. And Goldman obviously had fun writing it, unfurling thread upon thread of plot with the ease of a spider adding rings to a voluminous web. That good feeling wafts from the pages, softening the narrative’s rough edges and creating a story as comforting as the roast chicken Lewis makes for his lover. As the author brings his novel to a close, he cushions the already soft landing with mentions of cookies and lemonade, wool throws, and a fire. Is there anything cozier than that?

Priyanka Champaneri is the author of the novel The City of Good Death.