WHEN PARADISE TURNS TO CHAOS, WHO WILL SURVIVE?

An incredible true story of murder, romance, and a fateful search for utopia in the Galápagos by New York Times bestselling author, Abbott Kahler.

During the Great Depression, oil magnate George Allan Hancock and his team of Smithsonian scientists, who had spent four years traveling the Southern Oceans collecting rare samples for scientific research, discovered a horrific scene upon arriving in the Galápagos: two bodies, mummified by the scorching heat, on the shore of a remote island. Hancock was astonished to find an equally exotic group of people: European exiles who had fled political and economic upheaval, hoping to create a utopian paradise.

As Hancock and other American explorers would witness, paradise had turned to chaos. The three groups of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a wounded World War I soldier with his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two admirers—were fractured by conflicts. Trivial insults led to furious confrontations. The baroness, wielding a whip and a club with pearls, staged fights between her two lovers and flamboyantly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: two exiles missing, two others dead, and the survivors hurling accusations of murder.

Using previously unpublished records, Abbott Kahler crafts a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie, a mystery as captivating and bizarre as the Galápagos themselves. "Eden Undone" explores our universal desire for the search for utopia, while revealing the human frailty that inevitably renders such a search doomed.

Pages: 352, Dimensions: 15.3x15.3cm