Award-winning film producer, publisher, author, and investigative journalist Roger Rapoport has covered the Patty Hearst story for half a century. He has written for the Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, San Jose Mercury News, The Independent (UK) and the San Francisco Chronicle. His magazine articles have been published in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Esquire and Mother Jones.

Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of mystery novels published by Titan Books, spent almost nine years tracking down The Cocktail Waitress, the last novel of his favorite crime writer, and he’s passionate about it: “For fans of the genre, The Cocktail Waitress is the Holy Grail.  It’s like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin—that’s how big a deal this is,” he said in an interview with Highbrow Magazine.   Still, there were reservations.