"The Arctic trails have their secret talesThat would make your blood run cold."-Robert W. Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue. Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety. Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and...

In 1914, as rumors of war float across Europe, Edna Ferber travels to Budapest with Winifred Moss, a famous London suffragette, to visit the homeland of her dead father and to see the sights. Author Edna is fascinated by ancient Emperor Franz Joseph and by the faltering Austro-Hungarian Empire, its pomp and circumstance so removed from the daily life of the people she meets. Sitting daily in the Café Europa at her hotel, she listens to unfettered Hearst reporter Harold Gibbon as he predicts the coming war and the end of feudalistic life in Europe while patrons chatter.Then a shocking murder in a midnight garden changes everything.Headstrong Cassandra Blaine is supposed to marry into the Austrian nobility in one of those arranged matches like Consuela Vanderbilt's still popular with wealthy American parents eager for titles and impoverished European nobility who have them to offer. But Cassandra is murdered, and her former lover, the dashing Hungarian Endre Molnár, is the prime...

January 3, 1935. The trial opens in Flemington, New Jersey, for the man accused of "the crime of the century." And Edna Ferber is there to cover it.1932. On a windy March 1 night, Charles Lindbergh, America's hero, discovers that his twenty-month-old son has been snatched from his crib. A ransom is arranged. Yet two months later, Little Lindy is found in a ditch near his Hopewell home, several weeks dead from a blow to the head.It takes over two years to arrest a suspect. Bruno Richard Hauptmann is caught passing one of the marked ransom bills. Press from across the world swarm to his trial. Bestselling novelist Edna Ferber and raconteur Aleck Woollcott, both hired by the New York Times to cover it, are part of the media frenzy, bickering like the literary lions they are. Did this immigrant carpenter really commit the crime? Alone? Observant sometime-sleuth Edna is not so sure.Local citizens, whipped into a frenzy by the yellow press, march through the streets demanding...

A sweltering July in Chicago, 1923. Edna Ferber, now a famous short-story writer, is supposed to be researching the novel that will become So Big, her Pulitzer-Prize winner. With her mother, Julia, she spends the week visiting her mother's old childhood friend, Esther Newmann, who lives with her family on the edge of the bustling Maxwell Street Jewish marketplace.But the awful specter of a scandalous murder fifteen years before suddenly haunts Edna. Leah Brenner, the woman confined to a mental hospital after stabbing her husband Ivan to death, is back home, sitting next door on her front porch. Horrified, Julia Ferber laments the return of a brazen murderer to the quiet street. But Edna, meeting the old woman, believes she was condemned for a murder she did not commit. Leave it alone, the Newmann grandmother Molly insists—"it's old news."Life has moved on. Even Leah's children believe their mother stabbed their father. . .

In 1951 Edna Ferber travels to Hollywood to support a friend blacklisted because of the Communist witch-hunt. Against the backdrop of the premiere of Show Boat, she becomes involved with Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra and their circle of friends. When her friend is murdered, Edna understands that she has to find the killer.Review"Back from a long-ago prequel in her hometown (Escape Artist, 2011, etc.), formidable author Edna Ferber returns to the 1950s and to her most unlikely avocation: amateur sleuthing."--Kirkus Reviews"A host of Hollywood and Broadway personalities from Hedda Hopper to George S. Kaufman provide period color as a sharp-witted Edna probes for the reason behind Max’s murder." --Publishers Weekly“This is a thoroughly charming mystery. Edna Ferber makes a wonderful sleuth[,] and readers will be entranced by her plucky spirit and sharp-witted investigative skills.” --Booklist Starred review for Escape ArtistAbout the AuthorEdward Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for more than three decades. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and Journal of Popular Culture. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls discovering Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase.

She was 1932 Broadway's newest sensation. Then she was murdered.Three years after the Crash that ushered in the Great Depression, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Edna Ferber finds herself a guest at Noel Coward's lavish birthday party. The British wit, enjoying the Christmas holiday season in New York and bracing for a trip to Cleveland in the new year, has filled his room with rich, famous folks whose lives continue in stark contrast to those being lived out in the city's streets and poorer neighborhoods.Edna is haunted by the dark landscape of Manhattan outside Coward's elegant rooms: the snake-like breadlines, the shanty village in Central Park, the gaunt apple sellers in threadbare suits on freezing sidewalks. She has yet to be introduced to the Automat where a few cents are the difference between nourishment and starvation.Among those who've kept fortune intact is Dougie Maddox, the financially astute but socially naïve only son of a Fifth Avenue...