Fremont Jones mysteries by Dianne Day
Strange files of Fremont Jones
The year is 1905. Fleeing the confines of her staid Boston upbringing and a potential marriage to a loathsome suitor, the modern-thinking Caroline Fremont Jones opens a typewriting business in San Francisco using the name Fremont. Her business brings her in contact with the normally mild young attorney Justin Cameron, who reacts with hostility when Fremont takes dictation from "ancient gentleman" Li Wong. A week later, Li Wong is dead, and Fremont's office is ransacked. Another client, Edgar Allan Partridge, brings three manuscript stories to Freemont for typing but never returns to pick them up. His brooding tales are full of evil and very like those of his namesake. Fremont's investigations into the mysteries of her dead and missing clients lead her to suspect her rooming-house neighbor, whom she believes is a spy. There is even a little bit of sex as she makes the wrong decision of who to have sex with.
Fun and entertaining read of a woman who is trying to make a life for herself without a man. I read this probably 5 years ago and enjoyed reading it again to read more of the series.
Fire and Fog
The new book opens with Fremont dreaming that a train is approaching but in reality the great 1906 earthquake is hitting San Francisco. After rescuing her typewriter from the rubble, Jones goes to work helping out the Red Cross, typing letters in the home of a woman she saved during the tremor. When she finds Alice dead in the sitting room she hunts down the police only to find the body is gone. Labeled a troublemaker by the police Fremont must determine who would murder Alice but finds that she has a very sinister past. She goes hunting for illegal artifacts and helping her friend Meiling escape from an arranged marrage and find a new life. She even gets kidnapped by a ninja and escapes without anyone's help!
In typical no-nosence fashion Fremont manages to solve several mysteries while getting her life back on track. Plus she manages to catch the eye of 3 men including Michael Archer who may or may not be a spy.
Bohemian murders
Fremont has left San Francisco and taken a temporary job as a lighthouse keeper. She finds a body floating in the surf near her beach. The police seem uninterested in the woman's identity, and her body disappears from the local mortuary after the coroner rules that she was murdered. Later, Fremont is attacked by a masked rider as she travels through the fog-shrouded forest in her rig. Caught up in these baffling events, she decides to find out who the woman was and who killed her. Meanwhile Fremont's mysterious lover is living nearby in a colony of bohemian artists.
An obvious solution and once again Fremont's life is put in danger.
Emporer Norton's Ghosts
Death Train to Boston
Beacon Street Mourning