The glamor and grit of the 1950s comes to life in Helen Harrison’s scandalous retelling of a murder that rocked the art world

On the night of August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, killing himself. Pollock, the world-renowned abstract painter and notorious alcoholic, also killed his 24-year old passenger Edith Metzger in the crash…or did he? Metzger’s autopsy reveals that she was already dead before the crash. In this reimagining of that shocking night, this disclosure draws vacationing Detective Juanita Diaz and her husband, Captain Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, into a homicide investigation that implicates famous members of East Hampton’s art community, including Pollock himself.