Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II

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Using previously unpublished archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie, a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos themselves.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.