The Flapper, the Impostor, and the Stalker
In 1923, ten million families own the Model T, America’s most popular automobile. Ziegfeld Follies comes into its heyday and jazz reigns as king of music. This is the time when prohibition dominates social gatherings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald becomes the Flapper expert. Younger women all over the country shun having to wear corsets and trailing Victorian dresses like their mothers. These ladies rebel against waist-length braids in favor of the right to bob their locks. They argue for free speech and equality, beg to wear lipstick, and on occasion, show their knees.
When college-bound Kathleen McPherson, in Minneapolis, pushes her family’s traditional boundaries, she’s horrified to discover a stalker intent on killing her. A classmate, whose romantic life seems to parallel Kathleen’s, is stabbed to death near Kathleen’s home. Gossip implies the murdered girl carried on with an older man.
Kathleen and her best friend run away to Chicago to escape the knife-wielding stalker and to find happiness as flappers. Instead of an entertainer’s life full of fun and frolic, Kathleen encounters deception, death, heartbreak, and revenge. Not only does the stalker continue to pursue her, but now she must rescue her best friend from gangsters, and Kathleen must escape being murdered by the mob.
About Charlene Bell Dietz (Corrales, New Mexico Author)
Charlene Dietz, after retiring as an Albuquerque Public School educator and instructor for the College of Santa Fe, traveled the United States as an educational consultant for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. As a volunteer, she’s excavated dinosaurs, prepared fossils for exhibits, catalogued prehistoric life for the NM Museum of Natural History & Science, and served as a community lay person for over twenty-five years at the Sandia Federal Laboratories’ Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.
She now enjoys the peacefulness of living in the central mountains of New Mexico surrounded by wildlife where she can connect with her writing and artistic muses. Her espionage-family saga novel, The Flapper, the Scientist, and the Saboteur won the 2016 NM-AZ First Book Award, was a Finalist for the 2017 International Book Awards, and received a Kirkus starred review. “Readers will initially settle in for a standard mystery…this story becomes much more complicated than a simple whodunit—it delightfully turns into serious literature.”
Her second book, The Flapper, the Impostor, and the Stalker, is a stand-alone Roaring-Twenties historical mystery, revealing the young adult life of the ex-flapper of the first book and was released in late fall 2017.
