Escape Artist

Ferber makes an appealing if unlikely detective…. –Kirkus Reviews of Lone Star

In 1904, Edna Ferber is a 19-year-old girl reporter for the Appleton, Wisconsin, Crescent, an occupation her family considers scandalous for a proper young girl. By chance, she interviews Harry Houdini, in town visiting old friends. When beautiful young Frana Lempke disappears and is soon discovered murdered, the crime baffles the local police; Frana disappeared from a locked room at the high school. Edna asks Houdini for help in solving the murder. But as Edna pursues the story, she senses that she is being followed.

Though she is dedicated to her blind father, Edna’s homelife is in disorder. And now the newsroom has become a hostile environment, with a new city editor determined to undermine her….