This historical true crime book is about the July 1841 murder of Mary Rogers, a well-known "cigar girl" in New York City. There was not yet a unified police force in the city, and so the murder went unsolved. A year later, Edgar Allan Poe decided to use his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the mystery through his story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget."
I really enjoyed this book, as it combined a biography of one of my favorite authors and an overview of the murder of Mary Rogers and the subsequent investigations. Stashower also analyzes the aforementioned short story, and how Poe used the newspaper reports of the time to come to his conclusions. There is even some history of the newspapers in New York at this time. If you are an Edgar Allan Poe aficionado, a fan of true crime, or interested in early 1800s New York, this is the book for you! You will definitely learn something new.
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