The "enormously entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) account of a
shocking 1897 murder mystery that "artfully re-create[s] the era, the
crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off" (The New York Times)
AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME - "Fascinating . . . won't
disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson's The Devil in
the White City."--The Washington Post
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the
Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped
tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly
severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. 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 perplexing murder mystery.
Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William
Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival
newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. What
emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational
trial. 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 forever changed newspaper journalism.