O'Malley Investigations Origins: Books 1-3

Chicago, 1921.

The whiskey is illegal, the police are bought, and the best detective in the city can't put her name on the door.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Catherine Ashworth answers a want ad for a secretary because her rent is due and her name no longer opens doors. Patrick O'Malley hires her because a detective agency needs someone out front who looks respectable.

Then a steel man turns up dead behind a locked study, a suicide note that reads wrong, and a police detective who wants the file closed by morning.

She sees what he misses. He can go where she can't. Neither of them expects it to work.

DEATH TAKES A BOW

A society matron's diamonds vanish between the second act and the curtain call. A week later, a body turns up in the wings of the Chicago Opera House, and the missing jewels are the least of anyone's problems.

Kit works the boxes and the drawing rooms, trading on a name that still gets her admitted if not welcomed. Paddy works the loading docks and the fence men below stage.

The truth is waiting where the two worlds meet.

THE WRONG LEDGER

A junior clerk swears he never touched the missing money. The bank that employs him would very much like him to stop saying so.

What starts as a quiet embezzlement inquiry opens into something older and better protected, run by the same families Kit grew up dancing with. Paddy knows how this kind of money disappears. Kit knows who signs for it.

And Detective Ray Walsh has started keeping notes on them both.