About the book
It’s September 1902, and Mary MacDougall has fulfilled her greatest dream—opening her own detective agency. But this achievement doesn’tcome without complication.
Mary’s father insists that an older cousin come to work with her—as both secretary and minder. Jeanette Harrison pledges to keep the plucky sleuth away from danger, as well as from her unsuitable suitor Edmond Roy. This arrangement, embarrassingly, makes Mary the only detective in the state with a chaperone.
The new agency’s first cases hardly seem to portend danger or significance. There’s the affair of the nicked napkin rings…the problem of the purloined pocket watch…and the matter of the four filched felines.
Mary and Jeanette have not the slightest notion that one of these modest little jobs will blow up into the most consequential and perilous case of the heiress-sleuth’s budding career. What begins in triviality mushrooms into disappearance, betrayal, international intrigue, and murder. As she learns more and more, Mary’s prospects for making the acquaintance of an assassin’s blade improve exponentially.
Witty, fast-paced, and enthralling, A Fatal Fondness—the fourth tale in the series—delves deeply into Mary’s world and paints the portrait of an unconventional young woman ever-ready to defy propriety for the sake of justice.
Character guest post
Robert Sauer
Detective,
Duluth Police Department
Title: Mary
MacDougall and a Natural Talent for Detecting
I have known
about John MacDougall for years. Anyone who lives in Duluth, Minnesota does.
He’s among the Zenith City’s most distinguished citizens—a businessman of
acumen and honesty and a native Scotsman with a knack for turning one dollar
into many.
But I can’t say
that I knew much more about him than the accounts I occasionally came across in
the newspapers. I didn’t know the millionaire was widowed, and had a son and a
daughter. I particularly didn’t know that, round about last Christmas, I would
run into his girl at the house of another millionaire and have my world… Well,
not exactly turned upside-down. Rather more like it wobbled a bit. Because I
can tell you, whenever you run into Mary MacDougall, interesting things start to
happen.
My name is
Robert Sauer and I’ve been a detective on the Duluth police force for over five
years. Before that I walked beats downtown and in the West End. I came to
police work from the navy.
We received an
urgent call one evening early last December, the holiday season of 1901. A very
valuable item had gone missing at the house of Mrs. Ensign—a sapphire called
the Star of the North. Of course, when someone such as Mrs. Ensign has a
problem, we public servants hop to it. I arrived at her house and began
interviewing the guests, including Miss MacDougall. I asked what she might have
seen that evening and the evening before, when she handled the jewel at a
concert. All of sudden, she turned the tables on me, interrogating me about my
plan to catch the culprit. She wanted to know why, if Scotland Yard was collecting
fingerprints, weren’t we?
The next day she
came to visit me at headquarters with yet more questions. She was as uppity a
young woman as I’ve ever met—and I’ve met a few. If she’d been anyone else’s
daughter, I’d have told her off and sent her on her way. I thought she was
unusually curious about police work. Nosy, not to put too fine a point on it.
I had no idea
that, as I was checking out known jewel thieves, she was working the case from
her side—in her amateur but canny manner. And, by golly, what should she go and
do but crack the thing wide open. She was in just the right place to spot the
ultimate clue. A single little anomaly that no one else had spotted.
Well, thought I,
beginner’s luck.
I was disabused
of that notion a few weeks later. I
happened to be visiting friends down in Minneapolis, one them a police captain.
He asked if anything of interest had happened up north lately. And I told him
about the theft of the sapphire and how, of all things, a girl had solved the
case. Daughter of a millionaire, in fact. Quite unaccountably, he began to
laugh.
“Miss Mary MacDougall?”
he said.
“Yessss,” I said
warily.
“Last summer she
provided vital information to Opdahl—”
“The Minneapolis
detective?”
He gave a nod.
“—that ended a kidnapping ring. Saved an innocent man from a long stretch in
Stillwater.”
Not beginner’s
luck after all, it would seem.
And that was
why, when the young lady stopped to visit me last winter and spring, I didn’t
shoo her away. In fact, once or twice I had her do some discreet surveillance
for me, though strictly on the QT. When Miss MacDougall told me, at a
Decoration Day fête, that she would be vacationing in Upper Michigan, I informed
her of a matter regarding a woman committed to an asylum there, who had died. Miss
MacDougall sorted it out, after a manner, but somehow managed to end up in
jail. Her father was not pleased about that, and neither was my boss, the
police chief. As a result, I nearly lost my position. But my young friend—for I
do count her a friend—defended me fiercely, saving my neck.
Then there was the
recent matter of the body in St. Louis Bay. But that, I’m sorry to tell you, is
top secret. This time were I to share the details, and how Miss MacDougall was
involved, I genuinely would get the sack.
I can only say,
in conclusion, that I have never known anyone, man or woman, with the natural
talent for detecting that Miss Mary MacDougall has. Heaven only knows where it
will take her.
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