Summary

Violent, carnal, and profane. Not how you'd expect pretty, peaceful Minneapolis to be portrayed during Eisenhower's somnambulant 1950s. But the City of Lakes was also the 'anti-Semitism capital of America. ' Sexual predators, pornographers, and backstreet Romeos were on the prowl, and ill-tempered cops, haunted by brutal World War II experiences, weren't reluctant to thump the poor sap who rubbed them the wrong way. In 1955, Minneapolis was also a magnet for small-town girls who flocked to the big city desperate for work, love, and adventure - not always in that order. But Teresa Hickman, of Tiny Dollar, North Dakota, was a special case. She was beguiling, promiscuous, and, on a chilly April morning, lying dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood. She'd been strangled. Could the killer have been, among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey, Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist with no criminal history? There's no forensic evidence or credible witnesses tying him to her murder. Yet the police, including a pair of obsessive investigators with lethal secrets of their own, seem to agree that a Jewish dentist would likely get them a murder conviction in this town at this time. Small wonder that Rose's spectacular trial and shocking aftermath will mesmerize the Upper Midwest like few crime sagas before or since.