Book cover of Mystery at the Blue Sea Cottage: A True Story of Murder in San Diego's Jazz Age

Book description

This “fast-paced, thoughtful true-crime” examines the cultural shifts of Jazz Age America through a beautiful dancer’s mysterious and scandalous death (Kirkus, starred review).

In January 1923, twenty-year-old Fritzie Mann left home for a remote cottage by the sea to meet a man whose identity she had revealed to no one.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Mystery at the Blue Sea Cottage as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Veering away from fiction for a moment, this is a true crime tale set in the Jazz Age in San Diego. Flappers and playboys and actors in Hollywood during Prohibition, oh my! The biggest question this narrative nonfiction book doesn’t answer, though attempts to, is who killed the dancer, Fritzie Mann? A sensational story that was splashed on newspapers across the nation in the 1920s that I happened to stumble on last year. A tragic unsolved homicide by the sea that had me gripped from the get-go—and that’s saying something for someone not usually drawn to true crime—this book reads…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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