Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558615052
Publication Date: 10-01-2005

Available as an ebook on:
Kindle
Nook
Apple iBooks
Kobo

Afterword by A.B. Emrys
Laura was the ideal "modern woman" and the ultimate femme fatale. No man could resist her charms--not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to investigate her murder. This 1942 psychological thriller is as gripping and brilliantly constructed as the Preminger film.

"Vera Caspary's gift was perhaps more subtle, and deadly [than Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Charles Willeford]." —Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

"The novel has three great strengths. The first is Waldo Lydecker, Laura Hunt's mentor, the vain deliciously nasty newspaper columnist who narrates. . . . Its second strength is an ingenious plot twist that I won't spoil. . . . The novel's third strength is Caspary's having set a noirish crime story in the Manhattan haute monde of ad agencies, fancy restaurants, and society folk as odious as they are self-satisfied. Caspary (1899-1987), who worked in advertising as a young woman before becoming a prolific author of novels and screenplays, knew that world well and delighted in satirizing it." —The Washington Post

"An intriguing melodrama. . . . A top-drawer mystery." —The New York Times

"Everyone loves the movie, of course, but it is now possible again to read this stunning novel with one of the great surprise moments in the history of mystery fiction. Brava!" —Otto Penzler, Owner, The Mysterious Bookshop

"Laura continues to weave a spell . . . achieving a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style." —Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times

"Laura will beguile and unsettle readers: a love story with a sinister underside . . . it remains a compelling original." —Liahna Armstrong, President Emerita, Popular Culture Association