Coming July 2022 from Vine Leaves Press
A gender-swapped reimagining of the infamous Leopold and Loeb 1924 Chicago murder case, Jazzed casts the true crime with two rich, brilliant college women at the center, against the backdrop of Jazz Age New York City. Wilhelmina “Will” Reinhardt and Dorothy “Dolly” Raab develop an obsessive secret romance as freshman roommates at Barnard College. They share a passion for jazz and a sense of outrage at the hypocrisy of the racist, homophobic, misogynist world they were born into. The convergence of cultural crises and ecstatic hedonism serve as the match which sets off the murder they commit. Juxtaposing the thrilling scientific breakthroughs in quantum physics and artistic explosion of the Harlem Renaissance with the bigoted pseudoscience of eugenics and anti-immigration fervor that also defined the era, the novel brings to life the extremist threads of the 1920s that all too closely mirror the polarized times we live in now.