“No writer better articulates ourinterest in the confluence of
hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange
than Paul Collins.”—DAVE EGGERS
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood.
On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a
floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers
near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown
ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New
York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no
motives, no suspects.
The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897,
plunged detectives
headlong into the era’s most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon
by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph
Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the
murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the
streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely
trio—a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric
professor—all raced to solve the crime.
What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more
sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on
circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn’t
identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn’t even
dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich
evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful
re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this
day.
關於作者:
PAUL COLLINS is the author of seven books, which have been
translated into ten languages. His work has appeared in
Slate, New Scientist, and the New York Times,
and he is regularly featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition as
their “literary detective.” He lives in Portland, Oregon.