Start reading the adventures of Phryne Fisher now; she is a lot of fun. English aristocrat by birth, domiciled in Australia in the 1920s, Phryne is a liberated lady with a Chinese lover, two adopted daughters, devoted servants and companions, and a reputation for crime solving. Naturally, she has a high-placed pal amongst the local police, who is both prepared to spill the beans and to look the other way on certain occasions. So when a group of Phryne's male friends suspect they are being bumped off one by one, they come to Phryne for more than her gourmet food. As does local French chef when his affianced bride disappears.
However, Phryne's life really gets complicated when her lover announces that a marriage has been arranged for him. Perfectly happy to tolerate the wife, Phryne is considerably put out when her butler gloomily gives notice, since he draws the line at serving an adulteress.
However, the considerable emotional core of this book comes when Phryne realises that her men friends are in peril because of what they may have witnessed while soldiers caroused in Paris on a certain day in 1918. For she too had been in Paris on that day. After conducting heroic rescues as a wartime ambulance driver, Phryne had embarked upon a bohemian life in Paris as a recuperation in the aftermath of the war. Unfortunately, her traumas had deepened when she fell in love with a cruel man. Now living the life of a wealthy independent woman and famous sleuth, Phryne must nevertheless revisit the most painful period of her life in order to solve her case and protect those she cares about.
Greenwood's Phryne Fisher is a larger than life heroine with a real interior
life. I loved her.
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Susan Rowland
Other books. In the series are Cocaine Blues/death By Misadventure (US),
Flying Too High, Murder On The Ballarat Train, Death At Victoria Docks, The
Green Mill Murder, Ruddy Gore, Urn Burial, Raisens & Almonds, Blood & Circuses,
Death Before Wicket, Away With the Fairies.