In 1935, Nate Heller is hired to escort Amelia Earhart on a speaking tour due to numerous cut-and-paste death threats against her life. Heller suspects the threats are a stunt by Earhart’s publicity-hungry husband, and the detective’s growing closeness to the bisexual aviatrix leads to a steamy affair. Two years later, when Earhart embarks on her flight around the world—and mysteriously disappears over the South Pacific—Uncle Sam enlists Heller in a clandestine search of Japanese waters for the popular Earhart…and the top-secret plane she was flying. Blending the unsolved mystery and historical facts swirling around Earhart’s disappearance with Heller’s sarcastic wit, Max Allan Collins delivers another riveting tale of intrigue and betrayal, taking Heller far from his native Chicago. As he investigates, Heller discovers a treacherous plot involving marital betrayal and the U.S. government. Heller’s secret undercover mission leads to Saipan where Earhart is believed to be held prisoner. But Nate’s heartbreaking attempted rescue leads the detective to return, many years later, to extract his final revenge.”Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I’d lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers….” The woman, of course, is Amelia Earhart, and the man describing her is Nate Heller, ex-Chicago cop and private detective to the rich and famous. One of the most original characters in the historical mystery area, Max Allan Collins’s Heller has jousted with Al Capone, helped out Clarence Darrow, and probed the killing of Huey Long–taking all his cases very personally. But a bad experience with a sadistic Charles Lindbergh has left him leery of flying, and it will take all of Earhart’s charm to get him into a plane from St. Louis to Albuquerque, and then to Los Angeles. It’s 1935, and Heller has been hired by Amelia’s husband (the conniving publisher G.P. Putnam) to both guard her body and search out possible lovers on a book tour. A warm relationship grows up between the flyer and the detective, and when Earhart disappears a few years later, an overage Heller enlists in the Marines to search for her on the island of Saipan. The story is framed by scenes of a retired Nate in 1970 being persuaded to revisit Saipan by a persistent Earhart researcher, and the conclusions that Collins offers about her fate are as convincing as they are moving and exciting. –Dick Adler
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