The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, queer fiction
Series: Harriet Morrow Investigates #1
Pages: 320
Published by Kensington on December 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
The acclaimed author of the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity, and Lefty Award-nominated Devil’s Chew Toy delights with the first in a new historical mystery series set in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago, as America is entering its Progressive Era and Harriet Morrow, a bike-riding, trousers-wearing lesbian, has just begun her new job as the first female detective at the Windy City's Prescott Agency...
Chicago, 1898. Rough-around-the-edges Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. Just twenty-one with a younger brother to support, she seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires her as its first woman operative. The move sparks controversy—with skeptical male colleagues, a high-strung office secretary, and her boss, Mr. Theodore Prescott, all waiting for her to unravel under the pressure . . .
Only an hour into the job, Harriet has an assignment: Discover the whereabouts of a missing maid from one of the most extravagant mansions on Prairie Avenue. Owner Pearl Bartlett has a reputation for sending operatives on wild goose chases around her grand estate, but Harriet believes the stunningly beautiful Agnes Wozniak has indeed vanished under mysterious circumstances—possibly a victim of kidnapping, possibly a victim of something worse . . .
With Mr. Prescott pushing a hard deadline, Harriet’s burgeoning career depends on working through a labyrinth of eccentric characters and murky motives in a race to discover who made Agnes disappear. When her search leads to Chicago’s Polish community and a new friendship in Agnes’s charming older sister, Barbara, clues scattered across the city slowly reveal just how much depends on Harriet’s inexperienced investigation for answers . . . and the deep danger that awaits once she learns the truth.
My Review:
I had been intending to read another mystery this week, but the one I had wasn’t working for me, and this had been recommended by my reading group, so I started this instead and it immediately grabbed me – and well, there you go and here we are.
Where – and when – we are is Chicago in 1898, following 21-year-old Harriet Morrow in her first week as a private detective at the prestigious Prescott Agency. She applied for the job as an apprentice detective because she’s bored to death as a bookkeeper and tired of being unable to really use her brain in her work. But mostly because the job pays half again as much as she’d been making, and she’s the sole breadwinner for herself AND her 16-year-old brother.
She needs the money. She’s also pretty sure she’s not going to marry her way out of her financial dilemma, as she’s not the marrying kind. Not just because she bears absolutely no resemblance to the current popular standards for women’s beauty, but because she herself finds women attractive and men mostly annoying – at best.
She expects the new job to be a trial – or to be on trial – or honestly a bit of both. She’s still surprised she was hired AT ALL but intends to make the most of the opportunity. An opportunity which involves placating an elderly woman who lives next door to Mr. Prescott and, more relevant in this case, his wife. Mrs. Prescott wants to help her neighbor, Pearl Bartlett, who claims that her maid has gone missing.
Mr. Prescott expects Harriet to prove that the old woman is a bit ‘dotty’. Instead, she discovers evidence that suggests that the maid was kidnapped out of her third floor room in the middle of the night.
The case is hers. Harriet has a week to prove herself by finding the missing maid. Her investigation will take her from one end of Chicago to the other – by bicycle and streetcar and even the newly electrified ‘L’. One of her male colleagues will mentor her, while another does every underhanded thing he can to put her off the case and push her out the door, while the other women in the agency, the secretaries and clerks, sneer and snicker and snort in passive resistance to every move she makes.
But Harriet is intelligent, determined, and more than a little bit desperate. She’ll find Agnes Wozniak and prove herself to be a capable operative – no matter how many rules she has to bend and how many thugs she has to outrun. The job is hers to lose, and the world is hers to gain.
All she has to do is find one woman who someone doesn’t want to have found while learning more about herself and her capabilities than even she ever imagined. And survive the learning of it.
Escape Rating A-: This week started with a bit more of a whimper than I expected, but has certainly ended with a bang. Or more than a few bangs, if not quite an entire hail of gunfire. Either way, the week got better because I threw out my tentative plans and just picked up the books that called to me – and this was certainly one of those books.
What captivated me about this story is the way that it delves into so many things by letting us see this world that was through Harriet’s intelligent, discerning eyes. Because this case takes her from Chicago’s toniest neighborhoods to the heart of Polish Downtown, giving the reader a view of the gulf between Chicago’s wealthy upper classes and the rest of the city’s inhabitants as well as cycling its way into the insularity of its ethnic enclaves. The story dives deeply into issues of family dynamics and immigration, as Agnes’ own family ends up at war with itself. Agnes and her sister Barbara want to explore the freedom that America can give them, while their father expects to rule his roost just as he did in the ‘old country’.
Prescott’s initial assumptions about his neighbor shine a light on prevailing attitudes towards women. All the men previously involved in the case automatically dismiss any possibility that Pearl Bartlett might be right – because they’re just sure there’s an answer that fits better with what they believe about women. That most of the work of this case is handled by women, not just Harriet but also Pearl and the missing maid’s sister Barbara puts the lie to all the male assumptions even as the reader knows it won’t change a thing even when Agnes is found.
Making this even better is the way that the investigation is interwoven with Harriet’s journey of self-discovery. She’s always known that she prefers women, but she wasn’t aware that there is an entire hidden world of people similar to herself. That she has a community hidden just beneath the surface – as long as she keeps their secrets and they keep hers. For Harriet, it’s an eye opener, for the reader, it’s a reminder that the world and the people in it have never been as simple or as straight as defenders of the status quo would lead one to believe, and that love does always find a way.
This is, honestly, the short version of this review. My first try got into a LOT more detail in multiple areas because the story really grabbed me in ways I wasn’t expecting – AND it managed to give readers a good picture of the problems that Harriet encounters as a woman doing a job that is supposed to be in an exclusively male sphere, without spending half the book angsting over all the roadblocks she faces along the way. Instead, she angst just a bit over the very real danger she tends to place herself in, and that felt right for her personality as well as the story and wasn’t overdone AT ALL. And I enjoyed the book all the more for that.
In the end, I enjoyed this a LOT, and not just because it reminded me more than a bit of Fortune Favors the Dead and Lavender House. It’s probably also a readalike for Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister and Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart, but I haven’t read either of those and I have read (and loved) both of the others.
I’ll confess that I did skim a bit, because the case was driving me almost as crazy as it was Harriet. I could tell that it wasn’t what anyone thought it was, but precisely in what way wasn’t clear until near the end. That someone at the Prescott Agency was interfering directly in her investigation had the potential to head in a terrible direction, but instead was redeemed in a way that worked well. But it was still giving me plenty of pause in the middle of everything.
I enjoyed The Case of the Missing Maid rather a lot, more than I expected in fact, and not just for its street-level, bicycle powered exploration of late 1890s Chicago. So I’m thrilled that Harriet’s adventures and investigations will continue in The Case of the Murdered Muckraker (and doesn’t THAT title sound like Chicago all over?) coming in January, when it will be a blustery Chicago winter in the story and whatever winter weather readers get wherever they happen to be.
