MURDER FOR THE MODERN GIRL

Is she a glam, airhead flapper—or a serial killer of wicked men?

It’s 1927, and 18-year-old Ruby, the daughter of the state’s attorney, is known as someone who’s always up for a good time, a gorgeous party girl who dances with all the fellows. Nobody knows that Ruby can read minds, so none of her many casual beaus can guess that Ruby knows exactly who the unredeemable characters are. Certainly nobody has any idea that sometimes Ruby dons a wig and secretes about her person some arsenic (or cyanide, strychnine, belladonna, or chloroform—she’s not choosy!) in order to remove some extremely dangerous character from the scene. Enter Guy, 18, a morgue employee who can transform his appearance to look like anyone. All he wants is to learn enough about his special ability to control it, but in order to do that, he might have to solve a string of mysterious poisoning murders across the city. Can the would-be detective, doomed to perpetual disguise, have a romance with a sexy murderess? In a vivacious, corrupt, Prohibition-era Chicago where everyone appears to be White, characters speak in smart-alecky slang, and tropes collide chaotically to diverting effect. At times, the dependence on genre conventions results in stereotyping, for example around weight and social class.

A femme fatale heroine, a crime that mustn’t be solved: noir turned merrily upside down.