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

The acclaimed author of THE RIVER SORROW delivers a riveting novel set in the roaring twenties - based on the real-life murder trial of George Remus, one of America's wealthiest bootleggers during the Prohibition. October 6, 1927 - On a quiet afternoon in Eden Park, Cincinnati, Imogene, a beautiful society lady, is shot and killed by her husband, the notorious bootlegger George Remus. After spending a quiet moment over the body, Remus returns to his car and directs his driver to the police station, where he turns himself in. Shocked and fascinated by this horrible murder, the country gears up for a sensational trial pitting the man known as 'the king of the bootleggers' against Chief Prosecutor Charlie Taft, the youngest son of the former president. The trial reveals what happened to Remus's $80 million fortune, which disappeared while he was imprisoned on a minor charge; how his wife, the blue-blooded beauty once known as the Jazz Bird, struggled to free him; and how the federal agent who pursued Remus became desperately entangled with the Jazz Bird, embroiling himself and Remus in a complicated love triangle with deadly results. THE JAZZ BIRD is an exquisitely written novel of love and betrayal, of money and power, set in a time of glitz, jazz, and innocence.

Craig Holden is the author of three previous novels: THE RIVER SORROW, THE LAST SANCTUARY, and FOUR CORNERS OF NIGHT.