The Blackest Bird
A Novel of History and Murder
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Descripción editorial
Sweltering New York City, summer of 1841, the beautiful 'Segar Girl' Mary Rogers is brutally murdered. Popular amongst the journalistic and publishing elite, the task of finding her killer falls to High Constable Jacob Hays.
At the end of a long and distinguished career Old Hays's investigation will ultimately span a decade, involving gang wars, grave robbing, and clues hidden in the poems of the hopeless romantic and minstrel of the night, Edgar Allan Poe.
Superbly researched and compellingly readable, The Blackest Bird is both a richly textured and atmospheric portrait of the birth of New York, a city raging with bloodshed and duplicity, and a thrilling murder mystery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rose (New York Sawed in Half) takes on one of the most celebrated unsolved murders in New York City history the 1841 killing of Mary Rogers in this historical whodunit, but doesn't make the most of its potential. Rogers, an attractive young woman, achieved local notoriety as a sales clerk at a Manhattan tobacco shop whose clientele included such notable authors as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. After the discovery of the victim's mutilated body, Jacob Hays, the city's high constable, who makes a somewhat plodding and colorless detective, quickly narrows his scrutiny to Poe, whose second Dupin story was based on the case. While the author provides a convincing portrait of the New York literary world of the day, crime fans may be disappointed that the mystery's solution comes out of left field with no evidence to support it. This novel should get a lift from Daniel Stashower's recent factual study of the Rogers murder, The Beautiful Cigar Girl.
