Harriet Morrow, a spunky, bike-riding, independent, lesbian P.I. in turn-of-the-20th century Chicago, is back on the case in this brilliant historical mystery inspired by a real-life Windy City detective – from the acclaimed author of the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity, and Lefty Award-nominated Devil’s Chew Toy. For fans of Lev AC Rosen, Ashley Weaver, and Stephen Spotswood.

Chicago, 1898.
In the midst of the Progressive Era, twenty-one-year-old junior detective Harriet Morrow is determined to prove she’s more than a lucky hire as the Prescott Agency’s first woman operative. But her latest challenge—a murder case steeped in scandal—could become a deadly setback . . .
As the Windy City thaws from a harsh winter, Harriet Morrow finds herself doubting her investigative skills when she’s assigned to solve a high-stakes murder case well above her pay grade. And there’s also a catch. Harriet must somehow blend in as an “unremarkable” young woman—one who feels confident in skirts, not men’s clothing—on a quest to infiltrate the immigrant community at the center of the grisly crime . . .
The mystery has more twists and turns than her morning bike commute, with a muckraker found murdered in a southside tenement building after obtaining evidence of a powerful politician’s corruption. While Harriet gains the trust of the tenement’s women residents to gather clues, the undercover mission reveals an innocent mother might have been framed for the crime—and exposes ties to another violent death . . .    
Harriet soon realizes she has few allies as new dangers explode around her. Enlisting the help of Matthew McCabe, her only true confidante at the agency, and growing more protective of her budding relationship with the lovely Barbara Wozniak, Harriet will need to survive rising threats to assert her place in a world that’s quick to dismiss her—and out a killer who’s always one step ahead . . .

My Review:

This is SUCH a Chicago story. Specifically a story about the “City of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world” – even though Carl Sandburg’s famous poem won’t be published for another SIXTEEN years. It’s a story about a city whose politics are so thoroughly, infamously corrupt that its reputation was already made in 1898 and persists well into the 21st century.

A reputation that was certainly justified in Harriet Morrow’s 1898 and for decades thereafter. Whether or not it’s still true today is not within the scope of Harriet’s adventures.

However, the corruption exposed in THIS story, IS within the scope of Harriet’s adventures. After all, Harriet Morrow is the star of this show – even if it’s a show she’s still personally figuring out the scope of at this point in her fledgling career as the first female private investigator working for the prestigious Prescott Agency in 1898 Chicago. Not too far down the street – literally – is the more famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

Theodore Prescott’s reasons for hiring Harriet as his first female operative were more pragmatic than merely following in the footsteps of his better known rival. Not just that his wife was pestering him on behalf of their eccentric next-door-neighbor whose maid had gone missing. He threw Harriet at that problem because it seemed like it needed a woman’s touch – not to solve but to placate both women. Instead, Harriet found a real missing persons case (The Case of the Missing Maid), solved it, and made an excellent friend in Prescott’s neighbor Pearl Bartlett.

And earned herself a job as a private detective that pays 50% more than her previous job as a bookkeeper – although Prescott isn’t paying her nearly as much as he would pay a new MALE operative. She’s making enough to support herself and her 16-year-old brother – if barely. But she’s all too aware that she’s hanging on by a thread. She’s Prescott’s experiment, an experiment that he could end at any time.

Which doesn’t stop her from being more than a bit wary about the new case that she’s been assigned. Because the assignment has nothing to do with her skills and everything to do with her gender. A muckraking journalist who claimed to have dug through some particularly nasty muck regarding one of Chicago’s most notorious dirty aldermen, managed to get himself murdered. (All things considered, it would be more of a surprise the reporter hadn’t ended up dead.)

The location of his murder was a tenement building near the Stockyards. A killing committed during the day, while all the male residents were at work. The women, however, were home. The woman who found the body was arrested for the murder because the cops needed a scapegoat and didn’t want to – or had orders not to – poke their truncheons into anything the muckraker might have raked up.

Those women most likely know a whole lot more than any man is going to get out of them. But Harriet might. At least she might if she can find a way into the closed community – not as a resident – but as a female “do-gooder” from one of the nearby settlement houses.

Even if donning that role will require her to lie quite a bit and go back to wearing the dresses she’s just set aside for the more practical, more comfortable, and better fitting (in more ways than one) men’s suits she’s recently adopted.

She’ll have to pass as an “unremarkable” woman. Something that Harriet Morrow has never been able to do. But if she follows the trail that muckraking journalist left, she might just manage to fight City Hall exactly where it will hurt the most.

Escape Rating B: There is simply a LOT to this story. So much so that it takes a while to build up to – and to get into. It also refers to the first book in the series, The Case of the Missing Maid, quite a bit, but in a way that begs the reader to go back and read it if they haven’t already.

And they really should to get where Harriet is at this point in her story. Because it’s only been three weeks in her frame of reference, so she’s still dealing with the personal consequences. Specifically, the personal consequences that she’s just at the beginning of her journey to discover herself as a queer woman and live as much as that truth as feels right for her. That she might get arrested for wearing men’s suits is part of that journey, as are her tentative steps towards a romance with the rescued “missing maid” from the first story, Barbara Wozniak.

Those factors are what make Harriet unique and interesting as an independent woman in late 1890s Chicago and as a female detective finding her way both personally and professionally.

What makes the story is the investigation that she conducts, and the bustling, booming, brawling city she conducts it in. The Chicago of the Progressive Era, with its burgeoning immigrant population, its packed tenement housing, its sprawling stockyards and its infamously corrupt politics.

Harriet’s second case is every bit as much of a sprawl as the first. A sprawl that Harriet experiences at ground level from the seat of her bicycle.

There’s a HUGE amount going on, from the settlement houses (like Jane Addams’ Hull House) to the Stockyard’s Packingtown to the tony North Shore to the pigeons pooping on City Hall. (There’s not literally a perspective from the pigeons but I honestly could not resist the metaphor.)

Harriet is in the thick of a whole lot of things that she has no clue about – on multiple levels. She’s never been rich, but she never truly had to worry about a roof over her head or where her next meal was coming from until after her parents died. Compared to the immigrants squashed into Packingtown, she’s rich and comfortable even though it hasn’t felt that way since she’s been supporting herself and her brother.

The condition of working people, especially immigrants, was absolutely gruesome. The journalists were called muckrakers because there was so much muck to rake over the way that the high-and-mighty took advantage of everyone and everything while the people they were taking advantage of starved and slaved their way into an early grave.

That her pursuit of this case, combined with Chicago’s then-recent history (the 1868 Haymarket riot), puts Harriet amid the waning socialists and the rising anarchists isn’t surprising – although it very nearly is deadly.

And all of that is merely the tip of a big, dirty, iceberg. An iceberg that is covered in the snow of Harriet’s journey of self-discovery as a queer woman at a time and place where she can be arrested just for wearing trousers.

The case is fascinating, but to get to the heart of everything requires a lot of back and side story. That Harriet is learning – and making mistakes – as she goes helps the reader to both feel for her and learn along with her, but occasionally the pace of the mystery slows down to cope with the amount of information it needs to get out of the way and into the reader’s head, first.

“The past is foreign country, they do things differently there.” And the reader finds themselves learning the lingo of that “foreign country” through every push of the pedals in Harriet’s journey. Whether the reader enjoys that part or gets bogged down in it will certainly be in the eye of the reader.

I had some mixed feelings. On the one hand, I loved the deep dive into the history of the city, and had to smile at the mention of a few landmarks that are still around, like The Berghoff. Overall, however, all of the information that is included in the story – and there’s a lot of it – while it adds to the atmosphere and paints a colorful picture of just how the sausage of Chicago politics got made – also slows down the pace towards solving the multiple mysteries that arise.

I like Harriet as a protagonist a lot. I love that her agonies – which she certainly would have – mostly focused on the difficulties of bicycling around the city and the sheer amount of time it takes her, making progress as a detective, getting the respect of her colleagues and making incremental progress in that direction AND the difficulty of “on the job” training when the person training her is generally herself.

But as much as I enjoy the history AND Harriet’s perspective, she fumbles and stumbles a lot – as she would. There’s also a lot of information to fumble and stumble over and convey to the reader. I did get bogged down in the middle but I still wanted to see how Harriet would get through.

And I’m glad I did. And I’m equally glad that it reads as though Harriet’s adventures will continue.