To Murder and Create — Ardythe Ashley

To Murder and Create is an extraordinarily creative and engaging historical novel loosely structured around T. S. Eliot's paradigm-bending modernist poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Set in Boston of 1915, an array of eccentric and eminently charming tenants inhabit a boardinghouse sternly governed by a rule-bound yet likable landlady. They include the retired captain with a secret, the literary-minded cook, the spinster who has all but given up on love, two carpetbaggers who could have sprung from the pages of Mark Twain, the confirmed bachelor who stumbles into happiness, and the retired professor who is obsessed with his former student, T. S. Eliot. Star-crossed love, passion, jealousy, and courage take center stage in this captivating glimpse of an authentically rendered bygone world brimming with timeless questions of the heart and mind.