An ingenious killer with a penchant for rare books is targeting the Crescent City’s elite in this 1930s mystery by the authors of The Invisible Host.
A distressing rumor is circulating through New Orleans that one of the city’s prized artifacts—a fragment of the Gutenberg Bible—has been stolen. But when the rumor comes true and is followed by a series of murders, distress turns to outright panic. As the rich and powerful are targeted, newspapers churn out breathless headlines, and the police are left increasingly baffled.
Many stand to gain from the death of the victims, and each new clue only adds to the list of suspects. Now district attorney Dan Farrell must turn to a local crime reporter for help in unravelling a twisting plot of passion, deceit, and murder of truly tragic proportions.
Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (Celia Garth) and the great California gold rush (Calico Palace), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing—novels and screenplays.
After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of Deep Summer, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels Jubilee Trail, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction, Golden Dreams. Her novel Tomorrow Is Forever also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.