A Murderous Business by Cathy Pegau Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical mystery, mystery
Series: Harriman and Mancini #1
Pages: 302
Published by Minotaur Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Cathy Pegau's sharp, captivating historical mystery about two women in turn-of-the-century New York solving murder and fighting the heteropatriarchy.
There can be a blurry line between what is ethical and what is legal.
Margot Baxter Harriman took the reins of B&H Foods after her father passed. It’s not easy being a business woman in 1912, but she is determined to continue what her grandparents started decades ago, no matter what it takes.
When Margot finds Mrs. Gilroy, her father’s former assistant, dead in the office with a half-finished note confessing to nebulous misdeeds, she seeks out help from a very discreet, private investigator to figure out what's going on. Her company, and her good name, depends on determining the truth, otherwise she could lose everything, including her freedom.
Loretta “Rett” Mancini has run her father’s investigation operation since he started becoming increasingly forgetful. When Margot offers her the chance to look into the potential scandal with B&H, she jumps at the chance.
But the more the two dig, the more it becomes clear that Margot's company may be too far lost...and her life is at stake.
My Review:
This is a story about doing what is right instead of what is easy. Not that Margot Baxter Harriman has EVER taken the easy way, even when what is right flies in the face of accepted wisdom. Or at least, the ‘accepted wisdom’ of society that proclaims, frequently, loudly and often in the very voices and faces of the stockholders of B&H Foods, that women should be kept busy at home with their husbands and their children, and absolutely NOT running major corporations.
Not even if they were raised to do just that at their father’s knee. Not even if that woman is the only heir to the grandparents that began the company and the father that made it thrive.
Well, mostly made it thrive, and thereby, as the saying goes, hangs this tale. And possibly a few people’s tails as well – if they were still hanging criminals in New York in 1912, that is.
Mixing metaphors and allusions a bit, something is rotten in the state of B&H Foods, and Margot Baxter Harriman has been kept uninformed of whatever it is since she took the reins of the company when her father died a few months before the story begins.
But of course, because she’s a woman she’s on trial every single day, and she knows it, and she knows if she gives any of the men surrounding her an inch, they’re going to take control of HER company, whether because they think that it’s impossible for a woman to be in charge, or they mistakenly think they need to protect her from the realities of the (business) world because they sincerely care or are just doing it badly.
Or, they have something to hide.
When she comes into the office on a weekend just to pick up some papers, she discovers a tragedy. Her father’s right-hand woman and personal assistant, elderly and retired, is dead. Sitting in the office she left behind months ago, with a half-written note addressed to Margot that reads an awful lot like a confession that the woman never got to finish.
Before she calls the police, Margot pockets the note. Not because she suspects foul play. Or rather, not because she suspects foul play in Mrs. Gilroy’s death. But she does smell something foul, because if the note is to be believed – and she does – someone is cutting corners somewhere at B&H and it’s costing lives. Mrs. Gilroy’s half-finished letter opens a can of worms – and it’s up to Margot to discover just how deeply those worms have burrowed into a company that she has always believed was on the up-and-up.
It’s her company. It’s her name on the door. The buck stops with her – even if Harry Truman won’t be placing that sign on his Presidential desk for another three decades. Margot has to investigate the accusations, but she has to do it without alarming either the newspapers or the men watching her every move like a looming of vultures, just waiting for a vulnerable moment. A moment she is determined not to provide FOR them.
She also doesn’t know who she can trust, either with her company or her confidence. So she turns to someone who has never let her down – her personal chauffeur John Bascom who has nothing at all to do with the business, and asks for a reference to a discreet inquiry agent. Which Bascom delivers – in the person of private investigator Loretta “Rett” Mancini.
Rett needs the job to keep her own father’s legacy – his agency – afloat. And she needs the work because it’s in her blood. Rett and Margot just plain need each other – as friends, as confidantes, to keep each other’s secrets and to have each other’s backs.
Because someone is out to get both of them.
Escape Rating A-: I picked this up for the historical mystery – which was fascinating. Howsomever, I had gotten it into my head that the historical period was the ‘Gilded Age’ and that was most definitely my mistake. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the way that the story of the female owner/executive of B&H Foods was interwoven with the history of ‘Progressive Era’ efforts to regulate food safety. Which doesn’t sound all that riveting (pun intended), but turned out to be as the new rules and regulations – and the underhanded way of getting around them and covering it up – were behind EVERYTHING that happens in the story.
Contaminated food was killing people. Covering up the under-the-table deals that created the contaminated food were also killing people. Sorting out who’s doing what, and who’s being bribed to overlook it, becomes a thorny knot of a puzzle that Margot and Rett are in up to their necks – and it’s terrific watching them figure their way out – one mostly amateur step at a time.
I loved the way that Margot’s situation, as a female business owner in what is very much a man’s world, was explored and explained and occasionally even angsted over just enough and not too much. The way that her stockholders and upper managers all second guess her because she’s a woman, the way that they all, to a man, seem to expect her to fail, felt real and felt like she gave the problem its due – but didn’t take up half the story to chew on.
It was very no nonsense in a way that just worked for me, in that it is what it is, it was what it was, and it needed to be reckoned on and worked around and countered – but that struggle doesn’t take over the story.
What does take over the story – and moves it along at a compelling pace, was Margot’s and Rett’s investigation. They start off not knowing much at all, because Mrs. Gilroy died of heart attack in mid-confession – and she was still keeping secrets as she started that confession. So the story is very much about locating the pieces of the puzzle and then putting the puzzle together without knowing what picture the puzzle is going to represent.
The twists and turns of the mystery are so very twisted because it’s clear at the beginning that neither woman knows nearly enough about what they’re doing. Rett is still learning to be a private detective, while Margot knows significantly more about how to run a business – but significantly less than she thought she did about what is REALLY going on at the business she’s supposed to be in charge of.
Instead of a training montage that often comes into play with newbies and amateurs, what Margot and Rett experience is more of a ‘two-steps forward, one-step back’ investigation, where they try, and sometimes they fail, sometimes they get lucky, and sometimes a thug with a gun drops in to search the place they’re in the middle of searching.
So it’s a bit piecemeal and a fair amount of leaping and hoping the net will appear, but it also becomes a story of friendship and sisterhood and figuring out who to trust. The partnership that develops between Margot and Rett hits some of the same notes – and falls into some of the same investigative traps and pitfalls as both Last Call at the Nightingale and Fortune Favors the Dead – even though those mysteries are set a decade or three in this book’s future. Nevertheless, if you liked either of those, you’ll probably like this and the other way around.
And, like both of the above-mentioned readalikes, this is the first book in a series, the Harriman & Mancini Mysteries. I’m looking forward to the next when it appears – and especially to seeing how their partnership survives their utter inability not to get entirely too involved in each other’s business.
