From the Publisher
"Jazzed suffuses the eroticism of Highsmith and the intensity of Ellroy in an ingenious gender-swapping take on the Leopold & Loeb case. In her lover/killers, Will Reinhardt and Dolly Raab, Jill Dearman creates an unforgettable duo brimming with murderous passion and lusting for revenge on the society which won't accept them." Steven Powell, author of Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy
"Like some brilliant amalgamation of Patricia Highsmith's best work, Mary McCarthy's The Group and the Jazz Age tabloid-crime musical Chicago, Jazzed is a frenetic, scary, erotic, funny and darkly moving thrill ride with two mismatched anti-heroines who completely break the mold of their time and place-the elite Jewish intelligentsia of Roaring Twenties New York City. I thrilled to the twisted love affair and power struggle between Dolly and Wilhemina and how their unambiguous evildoing intersected with the intense sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism of the world they were born into. Rife with authentic period detail and sizzling with complex and obsessive psychological realism, Jazzed will rivet you right through to its haunting final pages." Tim Murphy, Christodora and Correspondents
"I galloped through this dazzling, incandescent, thrill ride of a novel. Dearman deftly creates a wild, sexy, and poignant world of Jazz Age Sapphic love, sisterhood, prohibition, booze, freedom, Harlem rent parties, Barnard classrooms, and wealthy Jewish homes. When awkward Wilhelmina meets up with a former Brearley classmate, the vivacious Dolly, they improvise on clarinet and piano and spark one of the greatest love stories I've ever read, and what begins as a passionate flirtation turns into a dangerous obsession. Dolly is obsessed with danger, crime stories, and the thrill of becoming a criminal herself; Will is obsessed with Dolly and will do anything for her. As their love deepens and they try to carve out a public life for themselves, their mistakes multiply, and they become reckless. What will happen to our complicated, riveting lovers? Equal parts thriller, lesbian pulp sex romp, and literary queer history, Dearman's novel will leave you panting for more." Carley Moore, author of The Not Wives and Panpocalypse
author of Love Me Fierce in Danger Steven Powell
An unforgettable duo brimming with murderous passion and lusting for revenge on the society which won’t accept them.”
author of Christadora Tim Murphy
Rife with authentic period detail and sizzling with complex and obsessive psychological realism, Jazzed will rivet you right through to its haunting final pages.”
author of The Not Wives Carley Moore
[A] thrill ride of a novel. Dearman deftly creates a wild, sexy, and poignant world of Jazz Age Sapphic love, sisterhood, prohibition, booze, freedom, Harlem rent parties, Barnard classrooms, and wealthy Jewish homes.”
author of Love Me Fierce In Danger Steven Powell
The eroticism of Highsmith and the intensity of Ellroy in an ingenious gender-swapping take on the Leopold & Loeb case…Dearman creates an unforgettable duo brimming with murderous passion and lusting for revenge on the society which won’t accept them.”
MARCH 2023 - AudioFile
Orlagh Cassidy delivers a strong performance of Jill Dearman's captivating novel, inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case. Cassidy captures the frenetic Jazz Age and the compelling nature of obsessive love. Quiet, awkward Wilhelmina and bright, glittering Dorothy, both musical geniuses, room together at Barnard and become lovers. As the story is told in alternating chapters, Will's infatuation with Dolly and Dolly's passion for danger lead them to the jazz clubs of Harlem, to lesbian salons, and eventually into criminal acts. Cassidy makes Will's preoccupation with Dolly and her willingness to do as Dolly orders painfully real. As Dolly's compulsion for increasingly risky behavior escalates, Cassidy gives her an irresistible intensity. JAZZED is edgy and disturbing as it reflects the destructive effects of obsession. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-04-29
An affair between coeds culminates in murder in Dearman’s Jazz Age melodrama.
In the early 1920s, Wilhelmina “Will” Reinhardt and Dorothy “Dolly” Raab are freshman roommates at Columbia University’s Barnard College for women, both daughters of wealthy New York Jewish families. They’re temperamental opposites who attract; Will is a bookish misfit who speaks 11 languages and is an expert ornithologist, and Dolly’s a flapper who flirts up a storm. Will, a lesbian, likes traditionally male clothes and is getting over a lifetime of shyness, while Dolly revels in the attentions of either sex and teasingly receives Will’s adoration. Their relationship deepens during giddy outings to Harlem speak-easies and intensifying make-out sessions, but it’s especially stoked by classroom discussions of the Nietzschean superman—or superwoman—whose superiority allows any crime in pursuit of a supposedly higher morality. This creed fires up Dolly’s sociopathic streak, and she ropes Will into a series of thrill-seeking transgressions, starting with arson and burglary. After the two are paired off with different roommates by Barnard officials, Dolly decides that they must defy the ultimate taboo by kidnapping and murdering a child. Dearman’s tale tweaks the real-life story of child-killers Leopold and Loeb into a love story of two women set in a richly atmospheric panorama of New York in the Roaring ’20s, awhirl in high society, hothouse dorms, and uptown gin mills. It’s also a crackerjack procedural, as Dolly and Will plot out a crime that’s almost perfect—except for a few slip-ups that put dogged detectives on their trail. At its center are indelible portraits of the doomed lovers: Will, who’s incurably awkward and ardently besotted, and Dolly, whose glittering, teasing surface belies a hollow core. Dearman perfectly renders the noir mood in evocative, punchy prose: Dolly, reacting to a pregnancy scare, “couldn’t imagine being strapped with a tot. It made her feel dead inside….Daddy had a few prize pistols in his office. She would sneak one out and practice firing it out in the woods, then once she had a feel for it she’d eat the barrel.”
A wildly entertaining and energetic period thriller.
