Eden Undone

WHEN PARADISE TURNS TO CHAOS, WHO WILL SURVIVE? Amsterdam, July 1929 At nine o’clock in the evening, the SS Boskoop set sail carrying Friedrich, a Berlin doctor, his lover Dore and fifteen other third-class passengers, all crammed inside five dank cabins. Fleeing Europe’s political and economic unrest, their final destination was the Galápagos Islands, where they hoped to create a utopian paradise. Los Angeles, November 1934 The wire reports travelled 3,000 miles across the Pacific and described a gruesome scene: on Marchena Island, a bleak and barren speck of land in the northern Galápagos, two mummified bodies are discovered – a man and a woman – both lying on their backs and barely recognisable from their long exposure to the elements Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to worldwide conflict, this compelling and haunting true story of adventure, obsession and murder uncovers the mystery of how they got there and who killed them. WHEN PARADISE TURNS TO CHAOS, WHO WILL SURVIVE? An incredible true story of murder, romance and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists, who had spent four years travelling the South Seas collecting rare specimens for scientific research, came upon a gruesome scene on reaching the Galápagos: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of the remote island. Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles – a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatised World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours – were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and a pearl-handled revolver, staged fights between her two lovers and brazenly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: two exiles missing, two others dead, and the survivors hurling accusations of murder. Using previously unpublished archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie, a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos themselves. Eden Undone explores our universal desire to seek utopia, while laying bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.