From New York Times bestselling author Alex Tresniowski comes a
page-turning, remarkable true-crime thriller recounting the 1910 murder
of ten-year-old Marie Smith, the dawn of modern criminal detection, and
the launch of the NAACP.
In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, ten-year-old
schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small town officials,
unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York
detective agency for help. It is the detective's first murder case, and
now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that
caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time.
Occurring exactly halfway between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and
the formal beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, the brutal
murder and its highly-covered investigation sits at the historic
intersection of sweeping national forces--religious extremism, class
struggle, the infancy of criminal forensics, and America's Jim Crow
racial violence.
History and true crime collide in this sensational murder mystery
featuring characters as complex and colorful as those found in the best
psychological thrillers--the unconventional truth-seeking detective Ray
Schindler; the sinister pedophile Frank Heidemann; the ambitious Asbury
Park Sheriff Clarence Hetrick; the mysterious "sting artist," Carl
Neumeister; the indomitable crusader Ida Wells; and the victim, Marie
Smith, who represented all the innocent and vulnerable children living
in turn-of-the-century America.
Gripping and powerful, The Rope is an important piece of history that
gives a voice to the voiceless and resurrects a long-forgotten true
crime story that speaks to the very divisions tearing at the nation's
fabric today.
