Wealthy spinster Evangeline LeClair leads a paradoxical life. By day, she fends off marriage-minded suitors. By night, she teaches English to factory workers at a social settlement in the slums. Evangeline is quite satisfied with the status quo until murder disrupts her routine. One of her students, a penniless immigrant, has been stabbed to death in Chicago's most exclusive hotel. The girl's brother, a known anarchist, is accused of the crime.
Evangeline wheedles her admirer, Freddie Simpson, into helping her track down the real killer. Their list of possible suspects is long: a captain of industry, a denizen of the slums, a shady doctor who mixes his own drugs, and a teenage prostitute from a sporting house in the Levee District. The gleaming surface of the World's Fair casts many shadows, and THE FALL OF WHITE CITY exposes the darkness at its core.
Nancy Wikarski is a fugitive from academia. After earning her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, she worked in corporate America for two decades before becoming a historical mystery author. Her books highlight unknown aspects of women’s history and contain elements of magical realism. In her Arkana series, she foregrounds the latest archaeological discoveries about prepatriarchal cultures around the planet and weaves these facts into fictional artifact hunts. Her Gilded Age Chicago books depict the real issues of first-wave feminism while following the fictional adventures of two amateur sleuths. Both her series have been award-nominated and have ranked on Amazon’s bestseller lists.
The author is a member of ALLi, Mystery Writers of America, the Society of Midland Authors, and has served as vice president of Sisters in Crime-Twin Cities and on the programming board of the Chicago chapter. Her short stories have appeared in Futures Magazine and DIME Anthology, while her book reviews and essays have been featured in Murder: Past Tense, Deadly Pleasures, and Mystery Readers Journal.