The Gossip Columnist's Daughter by Peter Orner

In the mid 1980s, I worked for the Chicago Tribune. I was an assistant for a gossip column called “INC.” I loved walking through the doors of the Tribune building, and on snow days sometimes my eye lashes along with my black tights would freeze, and not thaw until I was sitting at my desk. The Tribune had its star columnists like Bob Greene and later Mike Royko, but one of the area’s most famous columnists worked across the street from me at the Chicago Sun Times. His name was Irv Kupcinet, otherwise known as “Kup.” I would sometimes see him going out to lunch, dressed in his signature beige trench coat covering his 6-feet-tall frame.  He was a radio and talk show host, but he was best known for his newspaper job writing “Kup’s Column,” which ran in the Sun Times for six decades. While Irv and his wife Essee were Chicago royalty, most people also knew was that their lives were plagued by tragedy. In 1963, their beloved daughter Karen “Cookie” Kupcinet was found murdered in her Hollywood apartment, and that crime was never solved. The 22-year-old aspiring actress was at the beginning of her career, and was just starting to get small parts. “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter” by Peter Orner is historical fiction and centers around a struggling writer named Jed Rosenthal who attempts to solve the mystery of the Kupcinet murder. Rosenthal is the son of Lou and Babs Rosenthal, who are the fictional best friends of Irv and Essee Kupcinet in this book. Through the pages of this novel, Orner proposes a plausible plot of what happened to the Kupcinset’s daughter, and how their lives were changed forever. Did the Kupcinet’s know who killed their daughter? Did their friends know who killed the girl? Was there a cover up? Was her death part of a larger conspiracy? Woven in between the stories of President Kennedy’s assassination, the glamor of old school Hollywood, and Chicago’s legendary mob scene, “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter” is a fascinating tale, well-crafted and well-told. Orner’s unraveling of the decades long cold case unlocks a treasure chest of questions, that seem to have been covered since that fateful night in 1963. To buy this book on Amazon click here.