The creator of the Treasury of Victorian Murder series couldn't have selected a more complicated subject to kick off the Treasury of XXth Century Murder than the 1932 kidnapping of the 19-month-old son of aviators Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh from Lucky Lindy's new house in the country, away, the father had hoped, from hounding reporters. One of the original media feeding frenzies ensued, not least because newspapers were the vehicles for communications between the putative culprit and Lindbergh. A child's badly decomposed body, found two months after the kidnapping, was identified from clothing as the Lindbergh child, and eventually a German immigrant was executed for the crime. But the official investigation was fraught with irregularities, fraud, and suicide; the prosecution's evidence was completely circumstantial; and speculation about who really dunnit persists to this day. Showing his customary droll mastery of the short, telling stroke and laconically precise sentence, Geary portends that he'll render the rest of the twentieth century's most celebrated enormities as handsomely as he did the nineteenth's.

Gr 10 Up-Geary brings his excellent and attractive pen-and-ink style to this fascinating account of an infamous case of the early 1930s. In March of 1932, the child of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his parents' home in Hopewell, NJ, and the family began to receive a series of ransom notes. However, the subsequent investigation turned up very few plausible leads, and when the child's remains were found, the case became one of murder. Although the suspected killer was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, many questions about his guiltand about the nature of the crime itselfremain to this day. Using well-researched text and appealing art, Geary expertly recounts the crime's setting, the colorful characters involved (on both sides of the law), the communication between the kidnapper and Lindbergh, and the evidence both for and against Richard Hauptmann, the murder suspect. A good example of the origins of modern forensics, crime-scene investigation, and celebrity hysteria, this work is an excellent choice for most collections. Dave Inabnitt, Brooklyn Public Library, NY