In the summer of 1841, Mary Rogers, a young woman known popularly as "The Beautiful Cigar Girl," disappeared from her boarding house on Nassau Street in downtown New York. Three days later, her body, badly bruised and water-logged, was found floating in the shallow waters of the Hudson River just a few feet from the Jersey shore. Long a celebrated unsolved mystery, this case was a major cause celebre in New York City.

In The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, the historian Amy Gilman Srebnick traces the story of Mary Rogers, using her death as a window into the urban culture and consciousness of mid-nineteenth-century New York.