ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the crime stories published in the Minneapolis papers. One of the most memorable involved the murder of a young rural Minnesota woman and the eventual arrest, trial, and conviction of a middle-aged Minneapolis family man—her dentist, of all people. I found the case shocking, tragic, sordid, and at times incomprehensible. But with the limited experience and nascent vocabulary of a ten-year-old, I pored over the lurid particulars the way my buddies studied the box scores on the sports pages.

It would be a mistake, however, to say that The Secret Lives of Dentists is based on the actual Mary Moonen–A.A. Axilrod homicide case. The book you’ve just read is fiction; it was only inspired by the infamous events of the spring and summer of 1955. With my novelist’s hat on, I have invented the characters, places, institutions, scenarios, timelines, and conversations that occasionally echo the real thing, but exist on these pages solely for my storytelling purposes. Well, Minneapolis circa 1955 is pretty much the way I remember it.

I need to credit—by no means for the first time—the invaluable work of Twin Cities journalist and author Larry Millett, whose vivid review of the Moonen–Axilrod case in a wonderful compilation of true-crime features entitled Murder Has a Public Face (Borealis Books, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008) refreshed my memory and fired me up to tell my fictional story.

My thanks also to Dan Mayer and his crew at Seventh Street Books for their confidence, encouragement, and attention to detail. And to my wife, Libby Swanson, for everything else.