With gripping details, Chris Enss’s portrayals in Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the Midwest revisits times and circumstances that landed Midwestern women in the bad girl category.
One loved fast horses: riding as a young man, Flora Mundis, alias Tom King, was a horse thief in the 1890s in Oklahoma Territory. Elizabeth Reed dispatched husbands with poisons. Scam artists Fannie and Jennie Freeman, a mother-daughter combo, victimized railroad and trolley operators from Boston to Chicago. Anne Cook of Nebraska poured out her viciousness on strangers and kin alike. Sisters Patricia Cherrington and Opal Long conned with potions, spiritualism, the press and the stock market. This Bedside Book is a romping good read.
—Carmen Goldthwaite, author of Texas Dames: Sassy and Savvy Women Throughout Lone Star History