The Secret Lives of Dentists

Book excerpt: In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood. Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child’s father also her killer? Could the killer have been––among the many men drawn to her like flies to honey––Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died? There’s no forensic evidence or credible witnesses tying him to the murder. Yet the police, including a pair of obsessive investigators with lethal secrets of their own, agree that a Jewish dentist will get them a conviction. Dr. Rose’s spectacular trial and its shocking aftermath will mesmerize the Upper Midwest like few crime sagas before or since.