Karen Abbott - The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America

In The Ghosts of Eden Park, historian Karen Abbott gifts us with a story of sex, madness, and murder in Jazz-Age America that is as intoxicating as a hit of bootlegged bourbon. In Abbotts hands, truth is not only stranger than fiction, its also a hell of a lot more thrilling. I couldnt turn the pages fast enough.

S USANNAH C AHALAN , #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire

A stellar achievementLike a skilled bartender in an underground speakeasy, Karen Abbott expertly blends superb storytelling with immersive historical detail to create a heady cocktail of bootlegging, betrayal, and blood-dark passion. So vivid is the world she conjures that I could viscerally taste the whiskey and smell the sweatand hear the gunshots too. The Ghosts of Eden Park has that bittersweet brilliance of all great books: Though I couldnt stop turning the pages, I never wanted it to end.

K ATE M OORE , New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls

The Ghosts of Eden Park is a story so strange, so salacious, it nearly defies belief. Exquisitely crafted and expertly rendered, this book weds high drama to rigorous scholarship. Karen Abbott has mastered the art of telling true stories as riveting and suspenseful as fiction.

L INDSEY F ITZHARRIS , bestselling author of The Butchering Art

Abbotts meticulous research is matched only by her lyrical prose and uncanny knack for creating cliffhanging tension. You cannot look away from the page, as she brings a silver-tongued bootlegger, a maverick female prosecutor, and a host of bizarrely compelling characters to life, illuminating a pivotal chapter in American history. Karen Abbott is the master of historical suspense.

D ENISE K IERNAN , New York Times bestselling author of The Girls of Atomic City and The Last Castle

Karen Abbott triumphs again with The Ghosts of Eden Park, an atmospheric Prohibition-era page-turner, so redolent with ambition, dark passions, and suspense that it reads like a TV box set. Once you pick this up, you will binge-read it to the end!

H ALLIE R UBENHOLD , bestselling author of The Five

A S STRANGE AS THIS story may seem, this is a work of nonfiction, with no invented dialogue. Everything that appears between quotation marks comes from a government file, archive, diary, letter, newspaper article, book, or, most often, a hearing or trial transcript. One transcript in particular, which numbered 5,500 pages in total, allowed me to accurately depict detailed scenes and entire conversations and to reveal characters thoughts, gestures, personalities, and histories. For the sake of brevity, some trial testimony has been condensed. A comprehensive list of endnotes and sources (including for each line of dialogue) appears at the end of the book.

Reckoning, 1927

H E HAD BEEN WAITING for that morning, dreading it, aware it couldnt be stopped. An hour ago he was eating breakfast and now here he was, chasing her through Eden Park. The sun, strong for the season, bludgeoned through his fedora and inflamed his bald head. His silk trousers whisked against his skin. He heard the swish of his wingtips through the grass, the rasping of his breath. On the road nearby a brigade of cars clamored in the rush hour traffic. The throaty engines, the blaring of horns, the people determined to be someplace else. Exhaust fumes burned in his nostrils. Somewhere behind him were his own blue Buick and his driver, abandoned. Hed learned she wanted to kill him. His brain had wandered to a shadowy land, somewhere between sanity and madness.

For two years he had not been right. Friends and associates would attest to the difference, a stark split between then and now. He had long referred to himself in the third person, but such declarations became more frequent; there seemed an odd detaching, as if part of him had crept outside of his skin. With the slightest provocationjust a single, specific wordhis face purpled and his features knotted into a ghastly cartoon. He spoke of a halo hovering above his head, whispering to him, marking him wherever he went. He described shooting stars only he could see, their tails imprinting bright, lingering bolts inside his closed eyes. He rambled incessantly about love and betrayal and revenge. He embarked on nationwide searches, hoping to validate every suspicion that tumbled through his mind. He announced, with unwavering conviction, that people from all corners wished him dead: gangsters in St. Louis, a certain woman federal official in Washington, D.C., andworst of allhis wife, Imogene, who had razed his world to the ground. His Little Imo, his truest and sweetest, his Prime Minister, his centipede, his monkey, his gem; how would he ever forget those old, dead endearments from their past? He just wished to talk to her, hed insist. Maybe he could stop what she had set in motion. He had little time left.