Skull in the Ashes

In the early morning hours of February 3, 1897, Frank Novak’s dry goods store—in the small Iowa town of Walford—went up in flames. The townspeople assumed the charred remains found the next day were Novak’s, but evidence suggests otherwise. Peter Kaufman’s Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America is a lucid and meticulously researched account of this remarkable case. The mystery reads like a lively adventure yarn, as detect