Marisa Meltzer at the NYT:
The case was the stuff of tabloid dreams. It had everything: murder, blackmail, money, class, secrets, even the occult. And the public, in the time of Prohibition, anti-vice crusades and so-called purity campaigns to combat germs, couldn’t get enough of it.
Polchin knows the era, and brings to his account a wealth of colorful supporting detail. While in the Westchester County jailhouse, for instance, Ward (who, despite a lack of experience, was the head of New Rochelle Police Commissioners) was placed in the same relatively luxurious “jail apartment” that another scion, Harry K. Thaw, had inhabited some 15 years earlier, after shooting the architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden.
We also hear about the dapper William Fallon, a well-known criminal attorney, who in college “devised a three-mirror system that allowed him to cut his own hair, a trick that gave him complete control over the way he looked from almost every conceivable angle.”
more here.