Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her next nonfiction book, Then Came the Devil, is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a forthcoming podcast from iHeartRadio about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and in Greenport, New York, where she is at work on her next novel.
Abbott Kahler's website
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Let's start with an overview.
It's the stranger-than-fiction true story of a group of Europeans who tried to find utopia on a remote Galápagos island in the 1930s, and it turned into a real-life Agatha Christie murder mystery.
And you just happened to stumble upon a newspaper article about this eleven years ago?
I was looking up another case and I came upon, I think it was a San Francisco Examiner article from 1941. And the headline was this really fantastic tabloid passage that talked about a doctor with steel dentures, a baroness who was also known as "Crazy Panties" and her various love slaves—she drove one to his death and she was driving the other to ruin—and what was going on in this Galápagos Island. It was sort of a record-scratch moment where I went back and read it and started down a rabbit hole of research.
What was the other case you were researching at the time?
I was researching a murder during World War II, which I can't even remember the specifics of now. I should probably dig that back up because I don't know what I'm doing next!
Aside from that initial newspaper article what else were you able to find about the story at the outset?
There was a lot on this woman who showed up with two lovers on ...
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