"The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age" by Gary M. Pomerantz (Crown, $26) One evening in 1929, Myrtle and Jack Bennett began an evening of bridge in their Kansas City home with another couple. What happened next would make headlines throughout the country.

Minutes after Jack calls his wife a "bum bridge player" and slaps her across the face, a gun appears, and Myrtle fires five shots, killing her husband. The bloody event was triggered by more than just an argument. Myrtle later revealed that she was afraid of losing her husband — a traveling salesman — to other women, and it was this fear that elevated their dispute to its deadly crescendo.

Throughout the 1920s and '30s, bridge was a nationwide fad, and players throughout country soon became riveted by the murder in Kansas City. Myrtle hired James A. Reed, a former and future Democratic presidential candidate, as her defense attorney. Reed, one of the most prominent men in Kansas City and a cog in the Pendergast political machine, created high drama in the courtroom and kept the trial on the nation's front pages.

In a highly readable new book, Gary M. Pomerantz brings both the case and its aftermath into sharp focus. Set against the backdrop of the early years of the Great Depression, it is a story filled with colorful characters and surprising twists. For example, there is Ely Culbertson, a cunning player with a Russian accent who was one of the first American players to capitalize on the bridge craze. He saw the Bennett murder as an opportunity and used it as a way to dramatize bridge as the ultimate battle of the sexes. He and his wife, Josephine, became international bridge champions, and they helped redefine the game.

This book, which reads more like a novel than the documentation of an actual event, has everything —- bloody retribution, sexual innuendo and shameless hucksterism. It is perfect summer reading.

(c) 2009 King Features Synd., Inc.