It is 1920s Melbourne and Phryne Fisher, a beautiful wealthy woman and sometime sleuth, is deeply worried. Her lover Lin Chung is missing, believed captured by Chinese pirates. Lin Chung's family, who disapprove of his liaison with Phryne at the best of times, are being even more uncooperative. Some of them may be trying to kill her. As Phryne quizzes her liberated female friends for a pilot to fly her to hostile China, even she has to acknowledge, for most of the book anyway, that this problem is outside her considerable powers. Yet when Phryne receives a particularly gruesome gift, courtesy of the pirates, nothing will come between her and her determination to rescue Lin Chung.
Perhaps fortunately for Melbourne, Phryne has a more indigenous problem to solve while waiting for news of Lin Chung. For the police are baffled by the mysterious murder of an elderly illustrator of fairy stories for children. Suspicion centres on her home, one of a group of expensive exclusive apartments, and her work, an upmarket ladies magazine. Given that one of the victim's duties is to compose the problem page and answer the letters of desperate women, Phryne and her devoted household find many leads.
In addition to the liveliness of the writing and the clever plots, the Phryne
Fisher mysteries have two notable strengths. Phryne herself is a great heroine
and the examination of how a young woman of spirit and means negotiates 1920s
Australian culture is fascinating. Secondly, the assured touch by which that
world is portrayed, the sense of Australia as both an Asian and a multicultural
nation in the making, is a real achievement. Even Lin Chung's highly traditional
family have to adapt to the way their new home challenges their rigid plans
for their children. Phryne finally wins their respect and her right to a place
in her lover's life. This reader is cheering her on.
-------
Susan Rowland
There are thirteen books in the series featuring Phryne Fisher PI in Melbourne