She was 1932 Broadway's newest sensation. Then she was murdered.Three years after the Crash that ushered in the Great Depression, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Edna Ferber finds herself a guest at Noël Coward's lavish birthday party. The British wit, enjoying the Christmas holiday season in New York and bracing for a trip to Cleveland in the new year, has filled his room with rich, famous folks whose lives continue in stark contrast to those being lived out in the city's streets and poorer neighborhoods.Edna is haunted by the dark landscape of Manhattan outside Coward's elegant rooms: the snake-like breadlines, the shanty village in Central Park, the gaunt apple sellers in threadbare suits on freezing sidewalks. She has yet to be introduced to the Automat where a few cents are the difference between nourishment and starvation.Among those who've kept fortune intact is Dougie Maddox, the financially astute but socially naïve only son of a Fifth Avenue dynasty. His widowe