Intrigue, the Ku Klux Klan and a 90-year-old unsolved Oklahoma murder are the compelling ingredients of the first book scheduled to be reviewed this fall at the Kingfisher Bookcase Review Club’s Sept. 23 meeting.

The reviewer, Dr. Alan Berch Hollingsworth, is not only a prominent Oklahoma City physician but also the author of Killing Albert Berch, and the grandson of the hotel owner whose 1923 murder is at the center of the story.

The Klan was not only active in many Oklahoma towns in the 1920s but also cloaked in an air of mainstream respectability that made it especially dangerous for those who crossed it.

In 1923, Marlow was one of the Oklahoma’s so-called “sundown towns,” with signs posted warning black people who were out and about after dark that they did so at their own peril.

Albert Berch, together with his wife, Lula, owned and operated a Marlow hotel and chose to ignore the town’s sundown law.

Berch employed a crippled black man who worked as the hotel’s porter and stayed overnight there, in violation of the law.

The decision proved fatal for both men, who were shot and killed at the hotel, leaving behind Mrs. Berch and the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, who would become Hollingsworth’s mother.

The horrific crime remained shrouded in mystery until 90 years later, when Hollingsworth began an investigation after his mother’s death, and eventually wrote a book in which he identified the mastermind likely responsible.

Killing Albert Berch, part investigative journalism and part family memoir, is that book.

Hollingsworth was already a published fiction and nonfiction author before he took up investigating and retelling his family’s most haunting story.

But in his day job, he is a breast cancer specialist with a focus on predictive medicine who currently serves as medical director of Mercy Breast Center, the same facility where Dr. Rebecca Stough serves as clinical director.

An honors graduate from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, Hollingsworth also was the founding medical director of the OU Institute for Breast Health and later was named as the first holder of the G. Rainey Williams Chair of Surgical Breast Oncology.

He started one of the first formal risk assessment programs in the U.S. in 1993, and his program was then selected in the first round of sites accredited by the American Cancer Society for BRCA gene testing when it became available in 1996.

In addition to nonfiction publishing within his field of expertise, Hollingsworth also is the author of two fiction books about a high school and then college golf team in a fictional Oklahoma town.

Killing Albert Berch is Hollingsworth’s first foray into nonmedical nonfiction.

The Bookcase Review Club meeting is open to the public and begins with a luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Monday at Snider’s Catering.