Murder in Midsummer

Iowa, Summer, 1935 - five years into the Great Depression. Further west, parts of the Great Plains had turned into a dust bowl, sending thousands of migrants heading for California. But in Iowa it was hot and the corn grew tall and green. It was two years since prohibition had come to its long overdue end. But much of the lawlessness it had engendered remained in its wake. Bonnie and Clyde had been gunned down by lawmen only the year before.

. . .

These were hard times when twenty workers out of every hundred were unemployed, bank foreclosures on farms and private homes rendered far too many hard-working people homeless. In some circles, bank robbers had become folk-heroes. It was rumored that Pretty Boy Floyd gleefully burned mortgages while inside the banks he robbed. Even so, all was quiet in the sleepy Iowa town, surrounded by cornfields, amid the sweltering heat of the Midwestern summer, until William Breen set out on a drive to a neighboring town to conduct some of the bank's business. . . . .