In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood.
Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child’s father also her killer? Could the killer have been––among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey––Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died? There’s no forensic evidence or credible witnesses tying him to the murder. Yet the police, including a pair of obsessive investigators with lethal secrets of their own, agree that a Jewish dentist will get them a conviction.
Dr. Rose’s spectacular trial and its shocking aftermath will mesmerize the Upper Midwest like few crime sagas before or since.
Writing as W.A. Winter, Minneapolis journalist William Swanson is the author of four noir suspense novels, including
The Secret Lives of Dentists, described by
Publishers Weekly as “a riveting crime novel” and the
New York Journal of Books as “a masterful work of narrative fiction.” Swanson’s nonfiction includes three true-crime books, including
Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson and
Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman Sackett. For more information, go to
WAWINTERBOOKS.COM.
ISBN: 9781645060314
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Published: April 20, 2021
Winter does a masterly job maintaining suspense about the outcome and Rose's guilt, and deepens the narrative by integrating the city's pervasive anti-Semitism into the plot. This is a superior roman à clef.
The human drama of the crime, the investigation, the trial, and the aftermath are laid out with mesmerizing precision.