The Jazz Bird

Amazon.com Review After three taut, well-crafted contemporary mysteries, Craig Holden turns here to the 1920s, evoking a period rich in glamour and drama in a powerful and elegiac story told with consummate skill. Young Charlie Taft, a prosecutor who's the son of a former president and chief justice, doesn't need to solve the murder of Imogene Remus, the quixotic and exotic wife of Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus. George has already confessed to the crime, and his conviction is all but assured. But as Charlie delves deeper into the tangled history of the stunning socialite who defied her wealthy family to marry Remus and went to extraordinary lengths to free him from prison, he begins to doubt whether the bootlegger is insane, as he claims, or the real victim of his wife's betrayal. Holden brings a fascinating era in American history to life through the creation of complex, multidimensional characters who haunt the reader long after the last page is turned. This is a tour de force from a writer who gets better with every novel.