The Jazz Bird [Paperback]

After three taut, well-crafted contemporary mysteries, Craig Holden turns in The Jazz Bird 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. --Jane Adams, Amazon.com

"* 'Holden knows how to create a tight, high-velocity narrative and surprising characters, successfully combining these elements with some wild, over-the-top twists and a nightmarish, Hitchcockian sense of terror' THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * 'Craig Holden writes like a dream' WASHINGTON POST * 'THE RIVER SORROW was the most exciting and human book I read last year. I would have killed to have written some of its scenes' MICHAEL ONDAATJE, author of THE ENGLISH PATIENT

Craig Holden has established himself as one of Americas most intelligent and distinctive thriller writers. His first three novels were hard-edged and fast with a resonant, contemporary feel. The Last Sanctuary was inspired in part by the Waco siege and The River Sorrow drew from Holdens experience as a trainee medic. Common to both novels is a complicated, flawed main character who finds eventual redemption only through great personal sacrifice. Holden takes this theme into fresh territory by setting this novel in Prohibition-era Cincinnati and fictionalizing one of the crimes of the century. Set in 1927, the story centres on the murder of society belle Imogene, shot dead in a city park by her bootlegger husband George Remus on the eve of their divorce. A media feeding frenzy erupts around the subsequent trial. Remus claims temporary insanity at the time of the murder and makes a baffling decision to represent himself in court. He is pitted against Chief Prosecutor Charlie Taft, the son of a president and desperate to cement his career. As the trial begins, a fog of conspiracy and counter-accusation billows across the courtroom. Holden fashions this into a multi-layered plot of betrayals and ambiguities centring on Imogenes affair with federal agent Frank Dodge and the disappearance of Remuss $80 million fortune. Was Imogene betraying Remus or was she trying to save him? This book is even more ambitious and satisfying than Holden's earlier novels. His talent for narrative and hard-nosed, no-nonsense language is considerable, and his place in the thriller writers' pantheon seems assured. (Kirkus UK)

A consistently interesting fictionalized version of a real-life Jazz Age crime. After shooting his wife, George Remus, a.k.a. King of the Bootleggers, goes directly to the nearest police station and turns himself in, at which point the question becomes, of course, not who but "why"-and would he get away with it? The time was 1927, October 6, to be exact, the day when beautiful Imogene Ring Remus and her flamboyant husband were to bring a legal end to their puzzling, odd-couple marriage: until George ended it his way. Inevitably, when the trial began at last, the Cincinnati newspapers called it the "Trial of the Century," and certainly the requisite ingredients were there: murder, lust, endless betrayals, an exquisitely complex love triangle (enmeshed in it was Special Agent Frank Dodge, a star of J. Edgar Hoover's freshly minted investigative body, while Ohio's Chief Prosecutor was Charlie Taft, son of the former president), a lost, strayed, or stolen treasure, and enough headline-hunting principals to keep the Speed-Graphics boys popping flashbulbs to a fare-thee-well. Soon enough, the Defense made its strategy clear: not guilty by reason of insanity. But that strategy came only after Remus, a busy member of the Cincinnati bar in his pre-rum-running days, decided to let wiser friends prevail and backed away from his original chest-thumping stand that "Remus's lawyer shall be Remus" and accepted the hard-nosed, high-profile Carl Elston as co-counsel. The courtroom battle was finally joined, the tides sweeping back and forth until the very day of the verdict-which, when it came, came fast: in 15 minutes. A little long and a little slow, but with a "Gatsby"-like quality that lifts it way above the average. Once again, Holden ("Four Corners of the Night", 1999, etc.) proves he can do the job. (Kirkus Reviews)