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Also by Paul Collins:

The Murder of the Century, June 2011
Hardcover
Banvard's Folly, May 2003
Trade Size (reprint)

THE MURDER OF THE CENTURY
By: Paul Collins

The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

Crown
June 2011
On Sale: June 14, 2011
336 pages
ISBN: 0307592200
EAN: 9780307592200
Hardcover
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Mystery

On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.

The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio—a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor—all raced to solve the crime.

What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn’t identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn’t even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

Media Buzz

On The Media - July 23, 2011
Weekend Edition Saturday - June 25, 2011