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Be careful about going off in high dudgeon. You sometimes get more than you bargained for. Independent-minded, bright, Wellesley-educated Caroline Jones does just that when her step-mother and her father, the Honorable Leonard Pembroke of Boston, conspire to marry Caroline off to some unsuitable cad (in Caroline's view). In high dudgeon, she rebels and travels alone in 1905 across the country to San Francisco, intent on establishing a new life for herself. Not so terribly unusual. We now know, thanks to better, less biased research, that thousands of women in the late years of the nineteenth century peopled the frontier of this country, women alone or widowed. They took up homesteads, proved them out and ran farms. They established businesses. The frontier was not the sole province of John Wayne and the Sundance Kid. Many many women did what Caroline F Jones does in this novel. Not only does she move west, she also changes her name to honor, in some sense, a distance cousin, John C Fremont. Caroline F Jones is born again, this time as Fremont Jones. In San Francisco she establishes a typewriting business, transcribing hand-written or dictated documents for a fee. And so the adventures begin. She meets an attractive lawyer who sweeps her off her feet and into bed. An anguished writer beset by unknown dragons evokes terror and sympathy and Fremont becomes entangled in the affairs of the inscrutable Li Wong. Day writes with great wit, evokes San Francisco at the time of the novel and carries us with fine imagination through intrigue and tangled webs to a logical, satisfying conclusion. I commend this fresh new heroine to lovers of the mystery everywhere, and I look forward to the next in the series.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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