{ "item_title" : "The Girl at the Fox Tower", "item_author" : [" Adrian Halden "], "item_description" : "A young woman was found beside Peking's old city wall. The place became famous. The truth did not.In January 1937, nineteen-year-old Pamela Werner disappeared after leaving a skating rink in Peking. Her body was discovered the next morning near the Fox Tower, just outside the Legation Quarter. Chinese and British-linked authorities investigated, yet no one was charged. What remained was an unsolved murder, a fractured evidentiary record, and a cold case shaped by grief, empire, rumor, and approaching war.The Girl at the Fox Tower reconstructs Pamela's final known hours and the investigation that followed without forcing the surviving evidence into a convenient solution. It examines the route from the rink, the uncertain location of the killing, the stopped watch, missing belongings, medical findings, witness statements, and early false leads. Each detail is considered for what it can support-and for what it cannot.The book also follows Pamela before she became a case: her home at No. 1 Mapichang Hutong, her life as the daughter of retired British diplomat and China scholar E. T. C. Werner, and the narrow choices available to a young woman moving between expatriate privilege and the streets of 1930s Beijing. Her life remains the moral center of an account too often dominated by a tower, a father's accusations, and the names of suspected men.Werner's private investigation preserved letters, claims, and lines of inquiry that continued to shape public understanding long after the official case stalled. This historical true crime study tests those accusations alongside competing interpretations involving the foreign community, an intimate-suspect theory, political revenge, and the instability of war-torn Peking. Suspicion is not presented as verdict. Allegation, official finding, later interpretation, and public mythology remain distinct.Beyond the question of who killed Pamela Werner, the book investigates why the case failed to reach legal resolution. Two police systems operated across a fragile jurisdiction. British prestige and Chinese authority complicated cooperation. Parts of the inquest were closed from public view. Within months, occupation and war made meaningful reopening increasingly unlikely. The result was not an empty record, but one unable to complete the bridge from evidence to a legally established killer.Drawing attention to archival limits, institutional failure, newspaper panic, and the competing books that later reopened the mystery, this account explores how an unresolved crime becomes part of public memory. It asks what responsibility belongs to investigators, officials, writers, and readers when the evidence can still accuse, disturb, and suggest-but cannot honestly prove a final answer.Written in a restrained, victim-centered style, this is historical true crime for readers interested in cold case investigation, China history, old Peking, diplomatic conflict, damaged archives, and the ethics of unresolved murder. It offers atmosphere without sensationalism and inquiry without false closure.Return to the Fox Tower not for a manufactured solution, but for a disciplined examination of what is known, what remains disputed, and why Pamela Werner must remain more than the place where she was found.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/369/9798183695366_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "16.49", "online_price" : "16.49", "our_price" : "16.49", "club_price" : "16.49", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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