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'a dangerous business' is an entertaining, poe-inspired murder mystery.

Heller McAlpin

Since the completion in 2015 of her ambitious multi-generational family saga, The Last Hundred Years trilogy, Jane Smiley has loosened up with two fun novels.

A Dangerous Business is an entertaining, light murder mystery set in Monterey, California, in 1851 during the Gold Rush. It follows Perestroika in Paris , Smiley's charming, whimsical fable about various squabbling, talking animals (including the titular racehorse) living in the rough in Paris' Champs du Mars.

The setup of her latest: Two young prostitutes become uneasy when several women in their dangerous line of business disappear and neither the sheriff nor the local vigilantes seem to care. Risking further peril, they decide it's up to them to solve the mystery.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Eliza and Jean — one a young widow relieved to be rid of her abusive older husband, the other an adventurous, shape-shifting cross-dresser with a dark secret in her past — are determined to deploy logic and observation in the manner of Poe's Detective Dupin to figure out who killed their missing colleagues.

With few options for self-supporting employment, Eliza turned to sex work after her husband died in a bar brawl. She finds it preferable to the miserable marriage her Covenanter parents pushed her into to nip her budding romance with an Irish Catholic laborer back home in Kalamazoo.

Her madam, Mrs. Parks, is far kinder and more protective than either her husband or parents ever were — and so are most of her clients. Eliza has no intention of returning home to Michigan.

Jean, Eliza's sidekick, is a less fleshed-out character; she works in an establishment that caters to women — most of whom are sorely in need of some affection. The existence of such a brothel in 19th century Monterey strains credulity but, as with other historically questionable details in this novel, it doesn't impair its enjoyment.

Smiley's likeable protagonists appreciate the relative independence and financial security of their work. Again, somewhat dubiously, they are not just tolerant of but sympathetic to their clients' loneliness and physical needs, which leads to a surprisingly benign view of working in a brothel.

No soliciting for them: Eliza's male clients are carefully vetted by Mrs. Parks, who also employs a guard for her "girls'" protection. Yes, the novel makes clear that it's a dangerous business — but, Mrs. Parks reminds Eliza, so is being a woman. Smiley's characters treat their work matter-of-factly, as just another service industry, like housecleaning or plumbing, albeit with better pay.

The amateur sleuths, being Smiley characters, love horses — which they rent on their days off in order to head out of town to the surrounding canyons and woods in search of clues. What they find in them thar hills isn't gold.

As the bodies and clues pile up, Eliza becomes suspicious of all of her clients — the drunks, the lonely lechers, the sex-starved sailors, the talkative lawyer with a dagger in his jacket pocket, "the evangelical who wept and puked and passed out." She even starts to doubt the friendly young rancher who likes to take her out for breakfast, as if they were "a respectable couple."

Many nights, after her "business" hours, Eliza is too spooked to walk back to her boarding house along deserted streets thick with fog. To amp up the sense of menace, Smiley throws in some grisly corpses and a few purported ghost sightings. Even so, the overall effect isn't nearly as creepy as Poe's tales. Smiley keeps it light by not playing up the psychological aspects of her story, and her sensible duo don't seem terribly shaken by any of it. The result is a sort of perfumed Poe-pourri.

Of course, this is not the first time that Smiley has found inspiration in classic fiction. The template for A Thousand Acres, her 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winner, was Shakespeare's King Lear. Ten Days in the Hills was her take on Boccaccio's Decameron. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton was her answer to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A theme running through most of her work — including A Dangerous Business — is that lives are a mixture of good luck and bad, best navigated by improvising and remaining light on one's feet.

Smiley's latest is a bildungsroman as well as a murder mystery. Eliza, initially ignorant of so much, is uneducated but by no means stupid. She picks up knowledge everywhere: from her clients fresh off ships from around the world, from books they give her, like David Copperfield and A Scarlet Letter, and from overheard conversations about America's divide over slavery and the growing probability of civil war.

Eliza's determination to see the larger picture opens up the world to her. She is a young woman trying to define herself in a young country doing the same. Smiley wryly notes that her character comes to realize that "life had turned out to be more complex than even she, in her business, had expected."

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A DANGEROUS BUSINESS

by Jane Smiley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2022

An oddly pleasant little trot through Gold Rush–era California.

Applying methods gleaned from a Poe story, a pair of 19th-century working girls put their heads together to fight a crime spree.

This strange little book from Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley combines a lurid plot involving the serial strangulation and stabbing of prostitutes in Monterey, California, in the early 1850s with a naïve, plainspoken style of narration and characterization that makes even scenes of copulation and gore seem sort of G-rated. This reflects the personality of the protagonist, Eliza Ripple, who is the proverbial whore with the heart of a Midwestern elementary school teacher. Married off by her parents at a tender age to a nasty older man who drags her from Kalamazoo to California and then gets shot in a bar fight, she winds up on her own, working at the brothel of kindly Mrs. Parks. As her new boss explains it, “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Eager for companionship, she finds a friend in a cross-dressing colleague named Jean McPherson, who's employed at an establishment serving the women of the town, a possibly ahistorical narrative flourish which adds to the dreamlike quality of the narrative. As women continue to disappear, as corpses turn up in the countryside outside town, and as local law enforcement remains steadfast in its lack of interest, Eliza and Jean decide to emulate the methods of detective Dupin in a Poe story they've both enjoyed: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Eliza begins to observe and analyze her clients' behavior and the contents of their pockets and the various characters she runs into around town, with a focus on finding the murderer. Like their creator, Eliza and Jean have a love for horses, and the agreeability of their various rides into the countryside somehow makes a bigger impression than the gruesome finds they turn up.

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-525-52033-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | HISTORICAL MYSTERY | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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• Entertainment

‘A Dangerous Business’ review: Jane Smiley’s entertaining Western mystery

Book review.

It seems odd to call a novel about prostitution and murder light, but “A Dangerous Business,” Jane Smiley’s umpteenth book, oddly is. In 1851, Eliza Ripple is married off to a man who’s not nearly as rich as he’s made out to be, but far more brutal than he seems. So when, after moving her to the rough, sunny California boomtown of Monterey, he’s shot dead in a saloon, she takes a job in a brothel, naturally, where the work of servicing men’s desires is far more orderly and, under the watchful eye of the motherly madam, Mrs. Parks, far more safe.

Eliza’s plucky friend Jean is also in the sex trade, but in the much more civilized business of servicing women, and “almost all they want is affection, and time and relief from their daily round.” Jean is also a gifted actress, impersonating men and women of various sorts at whim.

In the background is the building tension over slavery, alluded to when Eliza’s customers speculate that there’ll be a war and when Jean confides in Eliza about her origins. In the foreground is the mystery of girls who won’t be missed going missing. When one of them surfaces in a river, and then Eliza and Jean stumble on another on one of their walks, the two women, primed by the work of Poe — specifically “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” — resolve to detect the culprit. This, as Eliza says, “is a dangerous business.”

But, as Jean smartly replies, “What isn’t?”

Well, apparently, prostitution, which Eliza, coming from a strictly religious family in Kalamazoo, takes to in a remarkably matter-of-fact manner. Actually, it might be more apt to describe Eliza’s approach as businesslike, because “business” is what her clients do with her.

Though Mrs. Parks tells Eliza, “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business,” there is, in Smiley’s telling of her story, a certain straightforwardness and simplicity that make it seem, even at the height of the drama of unmasking a murderer, decidedly safe.

It’s light, as I said, for all the weightiness of its subject — but entertaining, nonetheless. And even so, Eliza reflects, “life had turned out to be more complex than even she, in her business, had expected.”

Jane Smiley, Knopf, 224 pp., $28

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Jane Smiley’s latest? A Gold Rush-era California sex worker mystery

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A Dangerous Business

By Jane Smiley Knopf: 224 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Eliza was free. Dragged west to Gold Rush California from Michigan by her bully of a husband, liberated by a bullet that turned her into a widow, she considered her future in the windswept port town of Monterey . She did not miss her husband, who before he died had “made it clear that he intended to put it to her, whether she liked it or not, once or twice every day.” She did not miss her strait-laced Christian parents. She did not miss Kalamazoo.

Eliza’s options were limited. The logical next step for a woman without means was prostitution, and she took it up with few regrets. The widow known as Eliza Cargill became the whore Eliza Ripple. She found work in a high-class brothel and, blessedly free of the conventional obligations of womanhood, she serviced a lot of customers, from teenage virgins to fragile old men. She even made a friend. Life seemed tolerable, even better, until other prostitutes, nameless young women whom no one seemed to miss, began to disappear.

This is the setup of Jane Smiley ’s “ A Dangerous Business .” Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “ A Thousand Acres ” and many other novels, lives in Monterey County, and her new book is an homage to her home’s frontier past, when Monterey was a motley mix of banks, bars and brothels, a magnet for sailors, grifters and fortune hunters, ringed by rolling hills and trackless backcountry. This is a deftly constructed historical novel, but it’s also a murder mystery — and in that respect, the results are mixed.

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Eliza’s urge to find the truth behind the disappearances begins with a literary argument with her friend Jean, a cross-dressing prostitute and adventuress who services women. The subject of their dispute: Edgar Allan Poe , a horror writer whose short stories were giving Americans the creeps from coast to coast. Fast friends, “the only thing they disagreed on was the work of Mr. Poe, work Jean loved and Eliza didn’t like at all, as it was too strange and gave her the jitters. Yes, said Jean, that was the point, and she never minded having the jitters. That, at least, was better than feeling down; it gave you a curiosity about things.”

Curiosity could get a woman into trouble, but as Eliza reads she begins to warm up to Mr. Poe and his detective C. Auguste Dupin , finding something in her own makeup that mirrors the Frenchman’s coldly logical mind. As more bodies are found, Eliza and Jean are drawn into their own investigation. They have a knack for seeing what others don’t — a stained glove, a bonnet string, a corpse without a “baby finger” — but are hobbled by the fact that the citizens of Monterey don’t care about the victims and are not sorry to see them disappear.

The law, such as it exists in frontier California, does nothing. Even Mrs. Parks, Eliza’s employer, warns Eliza to keep her mouth shut. Like serial killers throughout history, the Monterey murderer preys on people who have cut ties with anyone who might report their loss. Even politics plays a role: Eliza acknowledges that “all of this could become an excuse to drive Mrs. Parks out of business and put all the girls into jail.” So Eliza and Jean patrol the streets and ride the hills above town, looking for bodies and clues.

Smiley has created several engaging characters. She vividly recalls the political uproar of the 1850s, when the country’s unity was threatened by the pernicious practice of slavery and even citizens of far-west California were drawn into the roiling debate over its future. Her wry sense of humor is a bright thread, and it must be said that Smiley, a lifelong horse owner, writes some of the best horses in fiction.

For Jane Smiley in the year 2020, tough times call for furry tales

The prolific novelist wrote “Perestroika in Paris,” about a horse and a dog in France, because it was soothing to focus on “kindness and trying to get by.”

But suspense in this story is like a simmering kettle that never quite boils. There are walks, conversations and discoveries; the sense of threat, however, is muted. Another ingredient in the narrative’s subtle, dreamlike quality is Eliza’s detachment, which is baked into her personality and heightened by her profession. Eliza is an acute observer of men and a kind human being, but the nature of her work requires that she disengage. What drives her, beyond the need to protect herself and survive? What tips her over the edge and into a confrontation with danger? It’s not completely clear.

Then again, Eliza’s detachment is her greatest asset; it helps her rise above the horrors she and Jean confront. After a dear friend is murdered, Eliza thinks of Poe’s detective and searches the author’s words for guidance and strength: “What struck her the most about Dupin was that he could look at all sorts of injury and destruction and still keep thinking in what you might call a cold and logical way.” She learns to use her head, and to master fear: “It was as if, for her whole life, she had been dumb and patient, like a milk cow. Now she reminded herself of Query, flicking his ears this way and that, but trotting on. She felt her fear slip away, rather like the morning fog bank receded into the bay and the sunshine lit up the sky.”

If “A Dangerous Business” falters as a crime novel, it fares better as historical fiction. The title comes from Mrs. Parks. “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business,” she tells Eliza, “but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

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I first heard about the unusually high number of horses dying at Santa Anita Park — which led to the temporary closure of the racetrack last week — from a friend at the barn where I keep my horses.

Smiley re-creates a world in which women — whether wives, daughters or prostitutes — are coerced, their movements constricted, their opinions dismissed, their very existence under threat. In this respect “A Dangerous Business” achieves the goal of all worthy historical novels: opening a window to the past, forcing comparisons to the present, raising unsettling questions about how much has really changed.

Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.

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The Women Can Save Themselves in “A Dangerous Business”

• Our review of Jane Smiley's new novel, "A Dangerous Business."

Jane Smiley’s newest novel A Dangerous Business begins in the 1850s. The Gold Rush is in full swing as the American Civil War begins bubbling to the surface of society. Eliza literally makes a name for herself—changing her last name from Cargill to Ripple—by seeking employment at a brothel in Monterey, California after the violent death of her husband. Life gets fairly easy for Eliza despite the volatile economy. She has steady room and board, a full stomach, and money in the bank, but her comfortable lifestyle is upended when a relaxing afternoon carriage ride comes to a halt at the feet of a dead woman’s body. The crime is reported, but no one seems to care enough to seek justice. Eliza and her friend Jean, who shares her line of work, take it upon themselves to find the killer.

Because Smiley’s detective novel premise is set in the mid-nineteenth century, she indulges in language that is illustrative of the time in a way that makes the story more tangible. From Eliza’s description of her client sessions to how she depicts her surroundings on her explorative walks, it is evident that she prefers a tactile and sensory existence. She casually refers to herself as simple-minded but her attention to detail suggests otherwise. Her mother’s attempts to tamp down her will and teach her, as a young girl, the “proper” place of a woman in society all but took hold. Eliza was forced to keep her eyes cast downward as a child, but as an adult is instead the most observant. Her inquisitive mind allows her to pull techniques from the work of Edgar Allan Poe to perform her version of an investigation to determine who has taken the lives of at least three women around town.

There are dynamics that exist within Smiley’s story that give it relevance today, despite its historical setting. Sex work is a lucrative occupation that affords women a level of socio-economic freedom and is a major thread worth noting. Jean also works in a brothel. She deserves more time on the page, but the time she does spend with the reader challenges societal gender roles. Jean dresses and walks through the world as a man whenever she sees fit. Further, her brothel provides service to women, lifting some of the judgment regarding both sex work in general and as it pertains to women participating in a nontraditional, sex-positive lifestyle.

Where the visage of progressiveness is lifted is in Smiley’s illustration of the value of women’s lives. Eliza and Jean are forced to seek justice themselves when the law ignores the deaths of multiple women. Nor are any of the men in town compelled to provide any assistance. Given today’s coverage of sex workers’ rights, the connection is evident—the treatment of women, in some respects, has not changed much since the nineteenth century. Eliza has no problems with most of her clients, but during the process of her investigation, she realizes that once she steps outside of her boarding house or place of employment, existing as a woman in the world is the real dangerous business.

Another quieter thread woven through the story is the moral dilemma of slavery. Prior to looking into these women’s deaths, Eliza had not given much thought to slavery since it didn’t affect her in any obvious way. But rumblings of war have the town on edge. Once she recognizes her place in the world a bit more clearly, she starts to ask some of her clients their stance on slavery and the war. She even reveals her own distaste for it to gauge the response from one man. Toward the end of the novel, Jean is encouraged by their adventure of hunting a killer—she found it empowering. She declares she will do her part as a servant of the Underground Railroad, which is no surprise to Eliza, given Jean’s rebellious tendencies demonstrated throughout their friendship.

On its face, A Dangerous Business is a crime thriller with a character like Josephine Marcus from the film Tombstone that asks her to find the western equivalent of Jack the Ripper. The book also presents women who, through necessity, push past the labels and traditions of the time to become heroes. Overcoming a strict upbringing, becoming financially independent, and working together to save the lives of the women in their town from a serial killer illustrates the power of these women who were told, and believed, they were less than, only to shake off the stereotypes and build themselves anew.

A Dangerous Business

Ismet Prcic’s “Unspeakable Home,” an Almost Unreadable Tome

By Jane Smiley

Knopf Publishing Group

Published December 6, 2022

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A Dangerous Business: A Novel

• By Jane Smiley
• Reviewed by Bob Duffy
• January 9, 2023

Winning elements fail to coalesce in this disappointing frontier whodunit.

A Dangerous Business , Jane Smiley’s new bit of historical fiction, pushes forward in a straightforward narrative rhythm that’s as pared down and reductive as the standard commonplaces of her heroine’s religious upbringing. As the story opens, we meet Eliza Ripple, a widow in mid-19th-century California. Eliza is also a prostitute, serving her clients with plainspoken efficiency, only vaguely aware of any disconnect with the stringent Calvinist-derived values of her youth.

This ironic, arguably conventional setup might seem to presage a plot reversal, or at least a quiver of emotional heartburn. Neither emerges early on.

Here’s the heroine’s backstory. Reared in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 18-year-old Eliza McCracken gets married — at her parents’ insistence — to a virtual stranger she just can’t warm to. New husband Peter Cargill, dreaming of Gold Rush riches, carries her off by wagon train to coastal Monterey. For Eliza, the match is unsatisfying: Peter, often drunk, regularly mistreats or, at best, ignores her. And so Eliza is unmoved when her husband, blundering into or fomenting a bar fight — she never discovers which, and barely cares — is soon shot dead.

Facing penury, she takes on the “Ripple” surname and drifts into comfortable harlotry, watched over by a kindly madam of a certain age who is hyper-protective and always free with a supplemental handout to keep her charge happy. Smiley describes the run of Eliza’s intimate activities in this homey brothel with casual directness and a touch of comedy:

“The fellow was tired, but he produced his prick even before he had his pants off — he was so eager that he stumbled across the floor, and Eliza had to reach out to steady him. They fell unto the bed, and he was done with his business in a few seconds.”

Significantly, Eliza’s place of “business” (a weighted term doing double and triple duty in the novel) draws no opprobrium in a town where men vastly outnumber women.

The matrons of Monterey not only regard the brothel with apparent acceptance, but they support a bordello of their own. Here, in an establishment mischievously named “The Pearly Gates,” women serve the needs of other women, which often — though not always — run only to sisterly conversational comforts and affectionate cuddling.

We wonder, with smug anticipation, if Smiley, feminist values to the fore, is crafting a utopian parable here, a new cloud cuckoo land or Animal Farm . Or maybe we just can’t shake our conditioned expectation of a coming plot reversal, a suspicion as difficult to wave away as a persistent mosquito.

As we wait for the allegory to beef up, or for a twist to materialize, the core storyline kicks in. Eliza befriends Jean MacPherson, a cross-dressing courtesan from the Pearly Gates:

“[Jean] might show up in rags at Eliza’s boarding house to go for a walk, she might show up in [an] elegant gown, or, as she did one day, she might show up in a pair of men’s trousers and a red shirt, with her hair tucked up under a straw hat.”

As their friendship deepens, the pair determines to solve a serial murder case that the threadbare local constabulary is ignoring. The killer (or killers) is preying on prostitutes in the area. Sophisticated Jean schools Eliza in the niceties of detection, with reference to contemporary best-seller Edgar Allan Poe and his pioneering crime-solver, C. Auguste Dupin. In her head, naïve Eliza, something of a frontier Nancy Drew, renders his name “DuPANN.”

Long story short, the two bring the case to a suitable resolution. Regrettably, for the reader, the tale winds along slowly as the women untangle the threads and ultimately find themselves in a big-bang, violent conclusion. But the pair’s progress to a solution, while not exactly plodding, lacks pacing and suspense. What’s more, all the promising relationship elements fade away toward the end, and the characters don’t seem to care.

All in all, this tale, though well written, flops around too much, never getting going and never settling into satisfying closure. It’s disappointing.

Bob Duffy is a Maryland author and book reviewer.

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BookBrowse Reviews A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley

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A Dangerous Business

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• Critics' Consensus ( 8 ) :
• Readers' Rating ( 1 ):
• First Published:
• Dec 6, 2022, 224 pages
• Nov 2023, 304 pages

• Historical Fiction
• 19th Century
• Coming of Age
• Female Friendships
• LibraryReads Picks
• Less Than 250 Pages
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About This Book

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• Reader Reviews

A leisurely mystery intersects with a young woman's journey to maturity in 1850s California.

Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres , among many other books, begins A Dangerous Business with an amusing note: "I would like to dedicate this novel to all the copy editors who, over many years, have steered me down the path to an understandable and readable book." Sure enough, A Dangerous Business is nothing if not digestible. Historical fiction for adults, it takes on the guiding, matter-of-fact tone of classic YA literature in the vein of Little House on the Prairie , though the subject matter is quite different. Smiley's novel relates the story of Eliza, a young woman raised in a strict Covenanter (a branch of Presbyterianism) family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, who traveled to Monterey, California during the Gold Rush with her new husband, a brutish man named Peter. After Peter was killed in a bar fight, Eliza accepted an offer of employment from Mrs. Parks, who runs a brothel in town. She subsequently found herself with the independence to enjoy her life free of the expectations that had come with her upbringing and marriage. In the midst of this new existence and a budding friendship with fellow sex worker Jean, Eliza becomes aware of a possible pattern of violent deaths involving women of their profession. Jean has introduced Eliza to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and Eliza uses the story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (see Beyond the Book ) as a sort of guide when the two begin to investigate the local killings. In combining these two threads — a coming-of-age tale and a murder mystery plot — Smiley deftly focuses the narrative on her main character's newfound curiosity about the world around her. Eliza wants to find out who has been killing women, but she also wants to better understand herself and others. Her attunement to the details of her surroundings and people she encounters therefore serves a dual purpose: gathering evidence and simply engaging in new experiences and observations. The mystery itself almost receives secondary attention as Eliza's days and nights unroll at a leisurely pace, the narration describing her absorption in the coastal landscape of the area, her meals at a local restaurant called the Bear, and the quirks and backstories of her customers. While Eliza's relative naivete allows the book to take on an educational tone concerning social and political issues, much of the ensuing commentary doesn't quite land. Discussions of slavery appear with an air of importance but remain surface-level and fail to meaningfully address Eliza's feelings about race as a presumably white woman, and a late revelation about the racial background of another character seems like a well-meaning but shallow effort to insert an element of diversity. Additionally, the supposed difference between the situations of Jean, who is portrayed as gay and works in a brothel that services women, and Eliza, who works with male clients she sometimes feels attraction towards, is starkly and unnecessarily emphasized. Sex between Eliza and her customers is described frankly, while Jean, who is otherwise unselfconscious and worldly, only speaks of her own work to say that the women who come to her place of business are often simply seeking small gestures of affection, resulting in a watered down and generalized view of sapphic sexuality. A Dangerous Business succeeds best in its quiet focus on the nuances of Eliza's psyche and her growth as a person, which include natural revelations about how the concepts of guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut within an unequal society. When the truth of the murder case is finally revealed, it comes across as fairly anticlimactic, and this is partly because of her mounting understanding of the broader culture of male violence — that "everyone who could have done it…might have done it." It's also because A Dangerous Business is not primarily the story of the murdered women or the mystery surrounding them, but of Eliza. She understands that she could easily end up a victim herself, and is determined to make the most of the life she has for as long as she has it. Her sober but optimistic attitude imbues Smiley's novel with an off-kilter inspirational appeal: "The tree rustled in the breeze, and Eliza made her New Year's resolution—that, even though she could be one of those who didn't make it to 1854, she did plan to keep her eyes open and do her best to get there."

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Beyond the Book:    "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe

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• Genres & Themes

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