The Flapper, the Impostor, and the Stalker
In 1923 ten million families own the Model T, America's most popular automobile. Ziegfeld Follies comes into its heyday and jazz reigns as king of music. This is the time when prohibition dominates social gatherings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald becomes the Flapper expert. Younger women all over the country shun having to wear corsets and trailing Victorian dresses like their mothers. These ladies rebel against waist-length braids in favor of the right to bob their locks. They argue for free speech and equality, beg to wear lipstick, and on occasion, show their knees.
When college-bound Kathleen McPherson, in Minneapolis, pushes her family's traditional boundaries, she's horrified to discover a stalker intent on killing her. A classmate, whose romantic life seems to parallel Kathleen's, is stabbed to death near Kathleen's home. Gossip implies the murdered girl carried on with an older man.
Kathleen and her best friend run away to Chicago to escape the knife-wielding stalker and to find happiness as Flappers. Instead of an entertainer's life full of fun and frolic, Kathleen encounters deception, death, heartbreak, and revenge. Not only does the stalker continue to pursue her, but she must rescue her best friend from gangsters and escape being murdered by the mob.
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Praise for C. B. Dietz's previous book, The Flapper, the Scientist, and the Saboteur, "Readers will initially settle in for a standard mystery . . . this story becomes much more complicated than a simple whodunit--it delightfully turns into serious literature." --KIRKUS (starred review)
"Charlene Dietz's newest novel takes the reader on an exhilarating romp through the dangerous but irresistible streets of Chicago in the roaring '20s. Murder, romance, and chic flapper style appear effortless among the novel's vivid characters, witty dialogue, and fast-moving scenes. You won't want to miss this one!"--JAMES AYERS, Managing Editor, UNM Press
"Kathleen is a privileged teenager from an upper middle-class family in Minneapolis. She seems to have everything a girl could want, including a scholarship to a prestigious girls' college. But she's a rebellious girl who has been seeing an older married man. She runs away from home with a friend to pursue a dancing career in the speakeasies of Chicago. She moves deeper and deeper into a questionable life fueled with alcohol and men, all the while haunted by a murder of a friend back home who was seeing the same married man Kathleen was seeing. Her reckless adventures and search for illusive happiness will keep readers turning pages all the way to the end." --PAULA PAUL, author of Forgetting Tommie and Sins of the Empress
"Charlene Dietz's finely drawn characters come to life in this gripping novel that captures the reader's interest from beginning to end. Although the story is set in the "roaring twenties," the elements of intrigue, friendship, and betrayal are still relevant today. The invincibility of the human spirit shines." --MARGARET TESSLER, author of Relative Danger and Sharon Sandoval mysteries
