Minotaur Books
September 2025
On Sale: September 2, 2025
Featuring: Morris Markey; Joseph Elwell; Zelda
336 pages ISBN: 1250367514 EAN: 9781250367518 Kindle: B0DPTPVHHS Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
From the author of The Lindbergh Nanny comes an evocative mystery about the 1920 murder of the gambler Joseph Elwell, featuring New Yorker writer Morris Markey and Zelda Fitzgerald.
New York, 1920.
Zelda Fitzgerald is bored, bored, bored. Although she’s newly married to the hottest writer in America, and one half of the literary scene’s "it" couple, Zelda is at loose ends while Scott works on his next novel, The Beautiful and the Damned.
Meanwhile, Atlanta journalist Morris Markey has arrived in New York and is lost in every way possible. Recently returned from the war and without connections, he hovers at the edge of the city’s revels, unable to hear the secrets that might give him his first big story.
When notorious man-about-town Joseph Elwell is found shot through the head in his swanky townhouse, the fortunes the two southerners collide when they realize they were both among the last to see him alive. Zelda encountered Elwell at the scandalous Midnight Frolic revue on the night of his death, and Markey saw him just hours before with a ravishing mystery woman dressed in green. Markey has his story. Zelda has her next adventure.
As they investigate which of Elwell’s many lovers—or possibly an enraged husband—would have wanted the dapper society man dead, Zelda sweeps Markey into her New York, the heady, gaudy Jazz Age of excess and abandon, as the lost generation takes its first giddy steps into a decade-long spree. Everyone has come to do something, the more scandalous the better; Zelda is hungry for love and sensation, Markey desperate for success and recognition. As they each follow these ultimately dangerous desires, the pair close in on what really happened that night—and hunt for the elusive girl in the green dress who may hold the truth.
Based on the real story of the unsolved deaths of Joseph Elwell and New Yorker writer Morris Markey, Mariah Fredericks’s new novel is a glittering homage to the dawn of the Jazz Age, as well as a deft and searing portrait of the dark side of fame.
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