Bold and ambitious, Miss Harriet Morrow has wrangled herself a position as the first female field operative for the Prescott Detective Agency, quite an experiment for agency principal Theodore Prescott. Maybe it\u2019s her ankles, which Prescott deemed \u201cthick and sturdy\u201d in her interview, but Harriet just isn\u2019t built like other women in the late 1890s, starting but not ending with her interest in a nontraditional role. She\u2019s determined to make good by finding Agnes Wozniak, the live-in maid to idiosyncratic widow Pearl Bartlett. On her initial visit to Agnes\u2019 quarters in Pearl\u2019s stately Italianate home, Harriet sees that the room has been tossed and a window left open, turning the disappearance into a likely kidnapping. The only agency colleague who helps Harriet track down any leads is Matthew McCabe, whose friendliness extends to acquainting Harriet with the right end of the gun\u2014the one where she\u2019s doing the shooting, at least during practice. Learning marksmanship doesn\u2019t make Harriet feel any safer, for her investigation brings her to unfriendly neighborhoods whose unsavory denizens she\u2019s certain would have made off with the pretty young maid if given the chance. She does find an ally in Agnes\u2019 older sister, Barbara, who seems almost as eager to impress as Harriet is. As she feels herself making headway, a saboteur starts working against her. Her time to find Agnes is limited not only by safety concerns but by her need to prove herself as a woman detective in her first case.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bold and ambitious, Miss Harriet Morrow has wrangled herself a position as the first female field operative for the Prescott Detective Agency, quite an experiment for agency principal Theodore Prescott. Maybe it\u2019s her ankles, which Prescott deemed \u201cthick and sturdy\u201d in her interview, but Harriet just isn\u2019t built like other women in the late 1890s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}