The Secret Lives of Dentists
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood.
Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child’s father also her killer? Could the killer have been––among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey––Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died? There’s no forensic evidence or credible witnesses tying him to the murder. Yet the police, including a pair of obsessive investigators with lethal secrets of their own, agree that a Jewish dentist will get them a conviction.
Dr. Rose’s spectacular trial and its shocking aftermath will mesmerize the Upper Midwest like few crime sagas before or since.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winter (Handyman) uses a notorious 1955 case as the inspiration for a riveting crime novel set in that same year. Homicide detective Arne Anderson and his partner, Melvin Curry, investigate the murder of 22-year-old Teresa Hickman, whose strangled body was found on some disused streetcar tracks in her Minneapolis neighborhood. A diamond ring on her finger appears to rule out robbery as a motive, and the autopsy reveals that the victim, who was pregnant, recently had sex. Anderson and Curry learn that she was a patient of Jewish dentist H. David Rose, who treated her just hours before her death, sedating her to perform the necessary procedures before walking her home. The dentist, who admits she accused him of having impregnated her, later changes his story, claiming to have blacked out while driving her home. When he woke up, she was gone. Rose is arrested and put on trial. Winter does a masterly job maintaining suspense about the outcome and Rose's guilt, and deepens the narrative by integrating the city's pervasive anti-Semitism into the plot. This is a superior roman à clef.
