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Lex Grae othersnow — In 1841, a 20-year-old boarding house worker, Mary Rogers -- a delicate beauty formerly renowed throughout New York City for doing nothing more than selling cigars at a tobacco seller's booth that catered to all classes of men enamored of her charms (including some of the city's most powerful leaders, businessmen and artists) -- disappeared from home and was found days later floating in the Hudson River, battered beyond recognition with parts of her own skirt stuck in her neck from strangulation or dragging, or both. Or was it Mary Rogers at all? And was she really gang raped, beaten and strangled by roving street hooligans, or did she die in some other nefarious fashion, with a subsequent beating meant to cover up the original crime? Did she die in the thicket near Hoboken, New Jersey, or somewhere else? And what about her temporary mysterious disappearance three years earlier? Was there a connection? Was a powerful man perhaps to blame? Or what about the mysterious sailor, or the man with the mutton chop sideburns? The massive number of questions arising from this unsolved murder -- one of the most notorious criminal cases of 19th century America -- do not faze Daniel Stashower in his experty crafted, meticulous and impossible to stop reading examination of the case, The Beautiful Cigar Girl -- a case so imprinted on the public consciousness of the time that writers, poets, journalists (in addition to law enforcement, the judiciary, business leaders and others) engaged in every manner of speculation in trying their hands at solving the crime. Although the murder of a prostitute, Helen Jewett, had kept the press and citizens of New York rapt just a few years before, Mary Rogers was seen as a "good girl," so that the outrage over her disappearance and death animated the zeitgeist at an entirely higher order of magnitude. The penny press -- the antecedent of yellow journalism -- was at its height, and the coverage of the crime was speculative, contradictory, irresponsible, with finger pointing among publishers, the cops, judges, and politicians laying the blame as the case dragged on for months, unsolved. New York City had a police force that was a laughingstock, essentially no different than it had been from the days since the Revolution: outmoded, powerless, underfunded, ineffective and corrupt. The city was overrun by gangs, many from the infamous Five Points slum not far from Mary Rogers' boarding house or the tobacconists. The book becomes a sweeping and flavorful account of a teeming New York City in the 1840s, bursting at the seams, filthy, dangerous and marked by extreme class and socioeconomic divisions. The Rogers case turned over a rock on the underbelly of the city, revealing shocking aspects of life usually left unspoken in light of the delicate sensibilities of the time, including the existence of brothels and abortion houses. Among the writers dabbling in speculations about the case was Edgar Allen Poe, whose lengthy story The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, was a not very veiled attempt to solve the crime in a fictional guise. In fact, the story mirrored the known facts of the real case while only changing the names of the players and the locations of the crime -- moving the action to Paris and the Seine instead of New York and the Hudson. In the end, like everyone else, Poe was stymied, but in the course of his deductions, Poe often brilliantly reconsidered the evidence and drew persuasive conclusions in several particulars of the case. The story was a showcase for Poe and the detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, whom he had introduced in his previous Murders in the Rue Morgue. The Rogers case dovetailed, as it happened, with Poe's invention of the deductive crime investigator in literary fiction. By trying to blend the story of Poe and his literature into the story of Mary Rogers, Stashower courts potential disaster, but succeeds in what he sets out to do. About one-third of the book is, in fact, a biography of Poe, which may dismay some, but it serves a purpose of lending context of the times, the arts and the development of mystery fiction. Because Stashower has consulted all of the available biographical material on Poe, he is able to provide the most pithy and balanced view of Poe's life possible, while at the same time penning a multi-faceted look at the Rogers case that is not likely to be bettered. The book is superbly written, and in the same manner of Erik Larson's popular historical fantasias juggles several centers of interest. Unlike Larson, whose attempts at doing this mostly strike me as inept in the way he cuts back and forth in his narrative threads, Stashower succeeds at keeping things clear, and betters Larson in actually establishing, achieving and sustaining narrative momentum. Stashower follows up well, presenting the aftermath of the Rogers case on the law enforcement and politics of the city as well as the literary legacy it had, especially in relation to Poe's work and those who followed, including Arthur Conan Doyle as well as those who mastered the art of blending fact and fiction in crime lit, such as Truman Capote. Just as the evidence in the Rogers case evolved and even perceptions about the purity of "the beautiful cigar girl" changed over time, perceptions of Poe changed with the times and fashion; Stashower shows the changes in Poe's reputation and how he has been perceived by enthusiasts and scholars over the years. This is an incredible, sweeping work of popular historical archeology, and once I picked it up, I absolutely did not put it down. I can't think of higher praise than that.