For some six decades, Irv Kupcinet, universally known as “Kup,” was a household name in Chicago. Six days each week he produced a celebrity gossip column for the Chicago Sun-Times that was syndicated to more than 100 newspapers. He hosted a television talk show for 27 years and counted Bob Hope, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bing Crosby and a host of other stars among his friends.

But even those familiar with Kupcinet’s name may never have known, or have forgotten, the tragedy that struck him and his wife, Essee, in 1963. On November 30th, their 22-year-old daughter, Karyn --- an aspiring actress known to her family and friends as “Cookie” --- was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment. Was her death the spontaneous act of an enraged ex-boyfriend? A mob hit? A drug overdose? Peter Orner explores these and many other questions raised by this perplexing case in THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST’S DAUGHTER, a novel 15 years in the making that’s both an intriguing fictional take on a true-crime story and a complex meditation on family, friendship and the lure of celebrity.

Orner (MAGGIE BROWN & OTHERS: Stories) channels this engrossing story through the voice of Jed Rosenthal, a Chicago native, creative writing professor, and son and grandson of lawyers. He’s the author of two modestly well-received novels. But, more than 60 years after Cookie’s death, he’s toiling away long past any reasonable deadline on a book that attempts to solve the cold case surrounding her death. At the same time, he’s unraveling the mystery of what caused the sudden rupture in the deep, longtime friendship between Kup and Essee and Jed’s grandparents, Lou and Babs Rosenthal.

"THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST’S DAUGHTER [is] a novel 15 years in the making that’s both an intriguing fictional take on a true-crime story and a complex meditation on family, friendship and the lure of celebrity."

Readily admitting his obsession with these stories, from the Chicago apartment where he lives with his cat, Rudy (who becomes an intriguing occasional conversational partner), after separating from his partner, Hanna, and the young daughter they’re co-parenting, Jed thrashes through the undergrowth of Cookie’s case and his family’s past. As he tries to make sense of these long-ago events, he moves seamlessly from the case to a family memory to his contemporary struggles, sharing his journey in a well-paced collage-like narrative. Included in it are news items, excerpts from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s file, a recounting of Jed’s own recollections and ones shared by relatives. Orner’s narrative strategy brings to mind Tim O’Brien’s IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS, another story about unearthing the truth of a terrible crime.

After graduating from a Massachusetts junior college, like thousands of young women before and after her, Karyn Kupcinet moved to Hollywood dreaming of stardom. Helped by her father’s connections in the business, she landed some minor television and movie roles, including one in Jerry Lewis’ movie, The Ladies Man. But even as her professional fortunes rose modestly, her personal life was troubled, marked by a Mexican abortion in July 1963, a tumultuous relationship with fellow actor Andy Prine, and struggles with her weight.

As Jed describes it, within 48 hours after Cookie’s body was discovered, his grandfather, Lou, and great uncle, Solly Rosenthal, flew with Irv Kupcinet to Los Angeles to support him as he confronted the reality of his daughter’s death, which he and his wife insisted until the end of their lives was murder. Meanwhile, Babs Rosenthal, Cookie’s godmother, raced to the Kupcinets’ Chicago apartment to comfort her friend, Essee. Nothing, it seemed, could shake the bond that existed between the Kupcinets and Rosenthals, which began when Essee and Babs met as 12-year-olds in a dance class.

As with any case layered over by the passage of substantial time and warped by the accretion of conspiracy theories, Jed finds himself descending an assortment of rabbit holes. They include one suggesting that Cookie’s death somehow was connected to the assassination of President Kennedy just a week earlier, or that famed Los Angeles mob lawyer and fixer, Sidney Korshak, was involved in ensuring that the coroner’s autopsy report would support the Kupcinets’ belief about the cause of their daughter’s death. It’s easy to picture him poring over dusty documents at 3am, trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle somehow shy of a few key pieces.

But for all the lurid details surrounding Cookie’s death, the Rosenthal family saga is the source of much of the novel’s emotional resonance. Jed shares the stories of their fortunes, good and bad, in the kinds of tales we’ve all exchanged to uproarious laughter around the holiday table or relegated to the darkness of the closet of painful family memories. Particularly affecting is his account of the tragic life of Solly Rosenthal, a large but quiet man, who plays a bit part in the Kupcinet family drama, but an outsized one in Jed’s telling. And though he ventures some theories about why Essee abruptly excised the Rosenthals from the Kupcinets’ lives only hours after her daughter’s body was laid to rest in a Skokie, Illinois grave, that act, when it comes, is as shocking as it is ultimately inexplicable.

Whether in his short stories, his novels or his essays, Peter Orner is a writer who’s never predictable and always invigorating to read. Those characteristics shine through in THE GOSSIP COLUMNIST’S DAUGHTER. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he summed up the novel as “a story of how a story can’t let you go.” Noteworthy for both its ambition and its originality, that’s an apt description of the feeling this book will engender in anyone who picks it up.