What I'm Reading

Old Business first: I loved Burgess Boys and didn't want it to be over. Would highly recommend it. In fact, I went to check out her last book called Olive Kitteridge and bought a used copy on Amazon for a penny plus shipping. Didn't remember this, but Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer. So I look forward to that.

And on to the new:

 

 

I'll let Amazon describe it. I've only read the intro and the first chapter.

 

Mystery novelist Stashower, who won a nonfiction Edgar for Teller of Tales (1999), a biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, returns to his historical roots in this examination of a celebrated murder in 1840s New York City that turned Edgar Allan Poe into an amateur sleuth. The text ably weaves the story of a young woman, celebrated for her beauty and her untimely death, with that of Poe, whose poems and stories often celebrated the deaths of young, beautiful women. Mary Rogers worked behind the counter of a cigar store in Manhattan in 1841; she was so beautiful that the store was jammed with her admirers. On July 28, 1831, three days after Rogers had gone missing, her body was found floating in the Hudson. The press seized on her murder, but the New York police force (depicted by Stashower as completely disorganized) failed to find her killer. One year later, Poe (just after the success of his detective Dupin in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") proposed to his publisher that he investigate this famous cold case. Although Stashower works a bit hard to invest this murder with multiple levels of significance, it remains an intriguing story, one that sheds considerable light on the snares of a big city for a young woman.

 

me again: I used to have a friend who lived on West 84th Street off Broadway and there's a house on that street where Poe lived, so the street sign has a sub-sign naming it Edgar Allan  Poe Street.