A review by stronlibrarianvibes
The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower

5.0

If you are a fan of Devil in the White City, I think you'll really like this book. It has a very similar narrative structure (oscillating between the two stories). But it's also very different, in that it tells the story of how an actual murder mystery impacted the creation of the mystery genre. Not as sensationalistic in detail as other novels, Stashower really understands and explains how Poe worked and reworked the Mary Rogers murder.