In 1904, Edna Ferber is a 19-year-old girl reporter for the Appleton, Wisconsin, Crescent, an occupation her family considers scandalous for a proper young girl. By chance, she interviews Harry Houdini, in town visiting old friends. When beautiful young Frana Lempke disappears and is soon discovered murdered, the crime baffles the local police; Frana disappeared from a locked room at the high school. Edna asks Houdini for help in solving the murder. But as Edna pursues the story, she senses that she is being followed.
Though she is dedicated to her blind father, Edna's homelife is in disorder. And now the newsroom has become a hostile environment, with a new city editor determined to undermine her....
Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and Journal of Popular Culture. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls discovering Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world.