Mrs. Cook and the Klan Booze, bloodshed, and bigotry in America's heartland

Journalist Chorneau (A Little Scherzo Plays in Drytown) stumbles with this half-baked work of true crime. In September 1925, Myrtle Cook, the leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan in Vinton, Iowa, was shot and killed in her home. Her murder made the front page of the New York Times, with quoted sources speculating it may have been a hit by Chicago gangsters. Though Iowa investigators initially suspected Cook's husband, he was never charged. Early on, Chorneau declares that he's solved the mystery, despite the fact that a 2008 flood destroyed "all the official records related to the murder." His conclusions rely largely on speculation, however, and he pushes the mystery to the back burner for much of the narrative, instead delivering a detailed history of Iowa and the KKK dating back to the 19th century. When Chorneau returns to the Cook case, he offers a lukewarm guess about the individual "most likely" to have gunned her down, then undermines the assertion by noting that, while it's a "long shot," Al Capone may have killed Cook when he was near Vinton in 1925. This overpromises and underdelivers. (Mar.)