One O'Clock Jump: A Dorie Lennox Mystery

Halfway around the world, war has begun, but for Dorie Lennox, a newly-minted private-eye on her first tail, danger is more immediate. The dark streets of Kansas City of 1939 offer swing music, fast cars, gangsters, and the chance to forget about the Depression and her own murky past. But first Dorie must conquer her fears and save a woman on a bridge high above the muddy Missouri. When the woman takes a dive, Dorie is thrown into a quickly unraveling scam that offers salvation to few - and misery to plenty - in the high stakes world of machine politics and desperation deals.

Lennox's path to Kansas City is full of detours, a brush with the law, a lost family, an aborted university and track career. But she's found a home of sorts in the Italian neighborhood of the Market, in a boardinghouse full of souls as lost and quirky as her own. Her switchblade goes everywhere with her, even as a rabbit's foot for luck, and sometimes as much more. Her boss, Amos Haddam, was a British soldier in World War I. Lost behind the lines he was gassed and has the scarred lungs to prove it. When he lands in the hospital, Lennox must carry the ball, clearing Haddam's name and finding who is playing her for a sucker.

With vivid, sure prose and sharp dialogue, the world of Dorie Lennox comes alive, behind the wheel of her Packard, into the packinghouses, race tracks, and mansions of Kansas City. The landscape of America, the homefront of World War II, is evoked in a thoughtful, forceful mystery that lingers for the force of characters and keen sharpness of a slice of history through the perceptive, compassionate eyes of Dorie Lennox.