BOOKS: Fact mixes with fiction in true

Jane Ammeson Times Correspondent

Jed Rosenthal is living a desultory life in a garden apartment with his cat, both having been exiled from the family home they shared with his partner and their daughter, who he can only see at approved times. Despite a job as a professor of writing at Loyola University in Chicago and receiving good reviews for his previous works, Rosenthal is disconnected from his current reality and immersed in his family’s past and the death of the daughter of their once close friends, shortly after JFK’s assassination.

The victim was Karyn Kupcinet, an aspiring actress and the only daughter of Irv and Essee Kupcinet, one of Chicago’s uber-power couples who stayed in the limelight from 1934 to 2003. Kup, or Mr. Chicago, as Irv was called, was a columnist for the Chicag