Death By Flapper

In a sea of bachelors, Penelope's dance card is a clue to murder. Dallas 1924 In the wake of her husband's untimely demise, Penelope Van Keesler is coerced into attending a lavish ball by her meddling mother. With their family's fortune teetering on the edge of extinction, Mother is determined to secure a wealthy match for her daughter. Whether she wants it or not. Dallas high society is crawling with eligible bachelors to save a family fortune. But when Penelope's dance partner, a national hero pilot, drops dead outside of the speakeasy, she ignores societal norms and sets out to discover whodunit. The pilot's suspicious death sends shockwaves through Dallas and leaves the police department scratching their heads. Armed with her charm, infectious laughter, and a razor-sharp mind, Penelope ruffles feathers and attempts to solve the puzzling mystery from the shadows. Will Penelope convince the skeptical authorities to accept her aid before the killer vanishes? Or will her stubborn pursuit of justice jeopardize her loved ones and their precarious fortune? ----------------------------------------------- Death by Flapper is the first installment in the Heist Society Investigates 1920s cozy mystery series. If you enjoy the glittering world of flappers, secret speakeasies, and glamourous deceit this jazz-age whodunit is for you! Heist Society Investigates Series Order Book 1: Death by Flapper Book 2: Death by Fortune Book 3: Death by Matchmaker

Enjoy this historical murder mystery from Brittany E. Brinegar, author of humorous whodunits... In a sea of bachelors, Penelope's dance card is a clue to murder. Dallas 1924 In the wake of her husband's untimely demise, Penelope Van Keesler is coerced into attending a lavish ball by her meddling mother. With their family's fortune teetering on the edge of extinction, Mother is determined to secure a wealthy match for her daughter. Whether she wants it or not. Dallas high society is crawling with eligible bachelors to save a family fortune. But when Penelope’s dance partner, a national hero pilot, drops dead outside of the speakeasy, she ignores societal norms and sets out to discover whodunit. The pilot’s suspicious death sends shockwaves through Dallas and leaves the police department scratching their heads. Armed with her charm, infectious laughter, and a razor-sharp mind, Penelope ruffles feathers and attempts to solve the puzzling mystery from the shadows. Will Penelope convince the skeptical authorities to accept her aid before the killer vanishes? Or will her stubborn pursuit of justice jeopardize her loved ones and their precarious fortune? ----------------------------------------------- Death by Flapper is the first installment in the Heist Society Investigates 1920s cozy mystery series. If you enjoy the glittering world of flappers, secret speakeasies, and glamourous deceit this jazz-age whodunit is for you! Heist Society Investigates Series Order Book 1: Death by Flapper Book 2: Death by Fortune Book 3: Death by Matchmaker ----------------------------------------------- Fans of Sara Rosett, Lee Strauss, and Benedict Brown will love this American spin on a roaring twenties mystery!

In 1922, all Max and Allison Hurlock wanted was a quiet life on Maryland's sleepy Eastern Shore, but a late night visit from an old friend plunges them into the double murder of a society couple in a locked room. Max must somehow cut through the confusion to find the real murderer, if he can stay out of jail long enough to do it.

In 1925 Paris everything is très chic, except murder.Jazz age Paris is home to writers, artists, dancers and painters who all flock to the city of light where living is cheap and the party never stops. Women's pages reporter Abigail Dixon is seeking her big break in hard news. When the dowdy reporter is sent to interview a famous fashion designer she wonders if she's made a terrible mistake. But Abby finds herself in the middle of a hard news story when her despised stepmother is murdered in the couture house. Even worse, Inspector Henri Deschamps believes she's the prime suspect.With only high school French to defend herself, Abby's in despair until a chance meeting with young reporter Ernest Hemingway convinces her to use her skills and clear her name by finding the real murderer.With help from new friends like Hemingway and Coco Chanel, Abby is transformed into a Parisian sensation. Can she enjoy her new bobbed hairstyle before losing her head? Because the French still punish murderers with the guillotine...

The Roaring Twenties -- a decade of wealth, abundance and decadence.... When two weeks pass with no contact from her daughter, Lucille Prado enlists the help of Tin Pan Alley ace private eye, Carney Brogan to find Alice -- a NYC career girl. With a dollar retainer, Carney quickly identifies Alice Prado as Arabella Germaine, the ultimate flapper girl, a beautiful platinum blond who loves a good time and ingratiates herself into all the right circles -- and who has just turned up dead at the city morgue. As Carney digs further, he finds a whole slew of suspects... Sally Blair, the actress and Arabella's roommate Victor Cathcourt; the flapper's mentor The wealthy Landon siblings, Robert and Regan....and more... From the Landon's Long Island estate to the dark streets of the Bowery, Carney follows the clues. But after a run-in with mobsters, has to wonder if he can survive long enough to discover who really wanted the gorgeous party girl dead. About the Author: Marva Dale is the pen name for author Debra McReynolds. Retired from the public relations field, Debra now spends her free time indulging in her passion for writing. "I used to fill my school notebooks with stories," Debra relates, "and then add artwork to go along with them. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Daley, predicted that I would be a writer one day."

Fantagraphics celebrates The Flapper Queens, a gorgeous collection of full-color comic strips. In addition to featuring the more well-known cartoonists of the era, such as Ethel Hays, Nell Brinkley, and Virginia Huget, Eisner award-winning Trina Robbins introduces you to Eleanor Schorer, who started her career in the teens as a flowery art nouveau Nell Brinkley imitator but, by the '20s, was drawing bold and outrageous art deco illustrations; Edith Stevens, who chronicled the fashion trends, hairstyles, and social manners of the '20s and '30s in the pages of The Boston Globe; and Virginia Huget, possibly the flappiest of the Flapper Queens, whose girls, with their angular elbows and knees, seemed to always exist in a euphoric state of Charleston.

One January day in 1923, a young boy came across the dead body of a twenty-year-old woman on a San Diego beach. When the police arrived on the scene, they found the woman’s calling card, which read simply, “I am Fritzie Mann.” Yet Fritzie’s identity, as revealed in this compelling history, was anything but simple, and her death—eventually ruled a homicide—captured public attention for months. In Fritzie, historian Amy Absher reveals how broader cultural forces, including gendered violence, sexual liberation, and evolving urban conditions in the American West, shaped the course of Mann’s life and contributed to her tragic death. Frieda “Fritizie” Mann had several identities during her brief life, and the mysterious circumstances of her death raise as many questions as they do answers. She was born in 1903 near the present border between Poland and Ukraine. She and her family were Jewish immigrants who traveled to San Diego to find security and prosperity. In the last year of her life, Mann became locally famous. She had reinvented herself as a flapper and “Oriental” dancer. She claimed to have friends in Hollywood and a movie contract. On the night of her murder, she said she was going to a party to meet her Hollywood friends; instead she traveled to an isolated roadside hotel where she met her death. An autopsy revealed that she was four and a half months pregnant. Absher guides the reader through the intricacies of this true crime story as it unfolded, from the initial flawed investigation to the sensationalized press coverage and the ultimate failure of the legal system to ensure justice on Mann’s behalf. Like other “new women” of her era, Fritzie Mann adopted roles that promised liberation from the control of men. In the end, her life and early death suggest the opposite: she became the victim of a culture that consumed women even as it purported to celebrate them.

Dead and dying women are surely an age-old narrative trope. While associations of femininity with death have become almost prototypical in literary criticism and are familiar fodder for cultural conversations, the editors of Death Becomes Her offer us an opportunity to investigate the values that underlie such associations. But from where does our tireless investment in what constitutes a feminine death, a feminine reaction to death, and death’s courting of women emerge? These essays give voice to the idea that power and victimization are not opposites, but rather are complements in an operatic fantasy of intrigue, agency, absence and presence that pervades American writing and experience. Each chapter of Death Becomes Her offers a different lens to investigate the nature of death as surely more than just an anatomical matter: The penny press obsessively covers the death of a beautiful prostitute in 1840s Chicago; a novel of seduction becomes also a narrative of autopsy; a story of haunting allows women outlets for sexual license and the polemics of desire. Overall this volume invites readers to explore the ways in which death is portrayed as both an ornamentation of femininity and an ontological reality of it: how, put simply, “death becomes her.” Essays include analyses of women’s deathbed scenes, suicides, murders, funerals, and autopsies in literature and other nineteenth-century media. As such, the chapters in Death Becomes Her show how the authorial and readerly interest in scripting and staging women’s deaths is both intricate and abiding. They tell us that death is never, of course, simply about death, and they make relevant other issues, from linguistics to politics, as they inform the literature and lives of women from the late-eighteenth to early twentieth-century America. Taken together, the pieces in Death Becomes Her allow us greater access to the surrounding culture out of which the American woman emerges, performs, lives and dies. In doing so, they offer fresh insight into the often unsettling and highly relevant role of death in feminism.