In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Marie Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case—beguiling, promiscuous, and on a chilly April morning dead by strangulation along an abandoned streetcar track in a sleepy Southside neighborhood. 

 

Terry Hickman was three months pregnant when she was murdered. Was the unborn child’s father her killer? Could the killer have been, among the many men drawn to her “like bees to honey,” Dr. H. David Rose, a middle-aged dentist who admits he was with her the night she died? There is no forensic evidence or credible witnesses tying him to the crime. Yet the police, including a pair of obsessive investigators with lethal secrets of their own, decide that a Jewish dentist would be a good bet to get them a conviction. Dr. Rose’s tumultuous trial and its shocking aftermath will transfix the Upper Midwest as few cases have. 

 

Inspired by actual events, the tragic, bizarre, sometimes darkly comic tale is recounted from the perspectives of the victim’s hapless sister, a war-scarred homicide-squad detective, a sinister cab driver, a callow reporter who, like Terry Hickman, looks for love in the wrong places, and the enigmatic dentist himself, uncertain until the end whether he’s a killer or not.