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This excerpt is part of our First Look column where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks into upcoming books across all genres!

Vanity Fair correspondent Joe Pompeo’s new book BLOOD & INK tells the true crime story of a Jazz Age murder. When a popular reverend with an heiress wife is murdered, secrets of his affair soon come to light. Meanwhile, America’s first tabloids were in their infancy and immediately saw their chance to dominate the conversations. Fans of true crime and forgotten histories will love this non-fiction thriller, out today!

Order your copy here!

On September 16, 1922, the bodies of Edward Hall, an Episcopal reverend married to an illustrious heiress, and Eleanor Mills, a choir singer married to the church sexton, were found on an abandoned farm outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey. The couple’s forbidden love affair was laid bare in the media circus that ensued. In the following excerpt, we meet Eleanor’s feisty and determined teenage daughter, Charlotte Mills.

The day before her mother’s funeral, Charlotte Mills received an unexpected visitor. Peter Tumulty, the Hall family’s gardener, came with a special delivery for the bereaved sixteen-year-old. Frances Hall and her entourage were on their way to Brooklyn, where Edward was to be interred at Green-Wood Cemetery. Before the limos pulled away, Frances had written a message for Charlotte on a piece of heavy parchment stationery, embossed with a large gold H at the top and bold script below:

Dear Charlotte,

Do not worry. Everything will be alright. You will be looked out for.

Sincerely, Mrs. Hall

Later, Charlotte showed the note to reporters. Her eyes welled with tears as she lamented, “I don’t think they’ll ever get the person who did it. Mrs. Hall knows less than anyone else, I think.”

Within the week, Charlotte’s opinion of her former Sunday school teacher turned to ice.

“Although Mom liked Mrs. Hall very much, I never did like her,” she said, speaking to reporters. “We never got along together, either when I was in Sunday school or personally.” According to the Daily News, Charlotte “bitterly assailed the widow of the rector, declaring that she hated Mrs. Hall.” A reporter pointed out that Charlotte had spoken warmly of Frances just a few days earlier, but Charlotte wouldn’t elaborate on her volte-face. She would only say, “I have changed my opinion about that.” Speculating about the killer, Charlotte said, “A woman did it, and it was a woman who was jealous of my mother and wanted revenge.” She didn’t accuse Frances directly, but she tiptoed tantalizingly close. “I think more than one person killed my mother,” she said. “A woman directly connected with the immediate families concerned, I am sure, can solve the mystery.”

In Charlotte Mills, the newspapers found an alluring subject, pert and vivacious, with good looks, confidence, charisma, and a requisite dash of theatrics. “She speaks her mind freely, and she looks older than she is,” the New York Herald observed, noting that despite Charlotte’s tender age of sixteen, “she appears sometimes to have the wisdom of 30.”

Bursting with ambition and dressed in the latest cuts, her dark hair cropped into a stylish ear-length bob, furs around her neck and skin showing below the knee, Charlotte was a symbol of modern femininity.

Within the week, Charlotte’s opinion of her former Sunday school teacher turned to ice.

Her generation was coming of age with the right to vote, a desire to work, a loss of inhibition, and visions of a life beyond dutiful homemaking. She could hardly lay claim to the cosmopolitan glamour of Manhattan’s flapper set—the Zelda Fitzgeralds and Josephine Bakers of the world. But Charlotte nonetheless personified the spirit of the movement, described in a 1922 article titled “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents”: “We are the Younger Generation. The war tore away our spiritual foundations and challenged our faith. We are struggling to regain our equilibrium. The times have made us older and more experienced than you were at our age.” If Frances Hall represented the last gasps of a dying worldview, Charlotte Mills embodied the inexorable currents of change. Speaking to reporters at her aunt’s house, she declared, “Mrs. Hall does not like flappers, and I’m a flapper.”

In late September, Charlotte wrote a letter to Edward I. Edwards, the governor of New Jersey.

Dear Governor,

I am Charlotte Mills, of New Brunswick. My mother, as you know, was murdered two weeks ago and it seems to me that the investigation is not bringing results. I have received letters from strangers saying that the political gang is running things. Can that be true? As we have no means whatever to get legal help is there not some way, dear Governor, to help me find the murderer of my mother?

Anxiously, Charlotte Mills

The letter appeared in newspapers on Thursday, September 28. Charlotte told the Daily News she wrote it on her own initiative, but investigators suspected she’d been encouraged by newspapermen. The day after her desperate plea appeared on the front pages, Charlotte turned up at Edwards’s personal office in Jersey City, the power center of New Jersey’s Democratic Party machine. The governor’s secretary informed Charlotte that Edwards was out, and she waited around for an hour before heading back to New Brunswick. When Edwards learned of Charlotte’s visit, he dictated a reply to her, which the New York Times printed in full.

“My dear Miss Mills,” the letter began. “I have read your pathetic appeal to me with profound regret and heartfelt sympathy for you in your extremely bereaved state of mind. I can assure you that even previous to receiving your communication, I had become actively engaged in endeavoring to assist, in every way possible, the authorities of Somerset and Middlesex Counties.” Edwards said he had ordered the state troopers to take on a bigger role in the investigation, and he assured Charlotte that justice would be served. “There is no need for you to spend a single penny of your limited means to carry forward the investigation. . . . The shocked conscience of the State of New Jersey will never be satisfied until the murderer or murderers of your mother are apprehended.”

I am Charlotte Mills, of New Brunswick. My mother, as you know, was murdered two weeks ago and it seems to me that the investigation is not bringing results. I have received letters from strangers saying that the political gang is running things. Can that be true?

Edwards summoned prosecutor Azariah Beekman for a long meeting in Trenton. The media attention surrounding the case, much of it critical, had swelled to epic proportions, and the governor, now also campaigning for a United States Senate seat, demanded progress.

“This murder must be cleared up,” Edwards declared. “There has been too much time lost already. . . . I want the murderer arrested, whoever he is. I expected an arrest yesterday and was surprised when there was none. . . . The people of this state are anxious to have this mystery solved.”

Thanks to young Charlotte Mills, Edwards’s patience with Beekman was wearing thin. Luckily for Beekman, he already had a new suspect in mind.