Synopses & Reviews
It's the 1920s in Melbourne and Phryne is asked to investigate the puzzling death of a famous author and illustrator of fairy stories. To do so, Phryne takes a job within the women's magazine that employed the victim and finds herself enmeshed in her colleagues' deceptions. But while Phryne is learning the ins and outs of magazine publishing first hand, her personal life is thrown into chaos. Impatient for her lover Lin Chung's imminent return from a silk-buying expedition to China, she instead receives an unusual summons from Lin Chung's family followed by a series of mysterious assaults and warnings.
Review
"Phryne Fisher isnt really a glossy girl, she's just pretending to be one to solve the suspicious death of an old luvvie who wrote and illustrated fairy stories for a womens magazine. Not exactly riveting reading by todays standards, but this story is set in the 20s when women read articles on how to be virtuous, and never ventured out without a hat or gloves. Greenwood manages to evoke the elegance of the era in this charming tale, which dwells as much on the wardrobe of the heroine as the morbid details of murder and mayhem." -- Vogue, June 2001
"Greenwood crafts a passable whodunit, but terrific historic color (complete with a three page bibliography) and the blithe proto-feminist heroine are the real highlights here." -- Kirkus Reviews
"This series is the best Australian import since Nicole Kidman, and Phryne is the flashiest new female sleuth in the genre." -- Booklist
"Kerry Greenwood makes it impossible for the audience not to like the charming Phyrne or her investigations." --Midwest Book Review
Review
Phryne Fisher is a character whose personality falls somewhere between gentle femininity and hard-boiled forensic capabilities. It is a combination which celebrates the emerging individual women of the 1920s.-- Weekend Australian
I loved this book.... its central character is a cool, elegant, sharply intelligent female sleuth called Phryne Fisher, whose glamour belies the fact that she is both fierce and fiercely independent. -- City Weekly
Phryne infiltrates the staff of Women's Choice with all the aplomb of Lord Peter Wimsey taking on the advertising game, casually dispensing balm to fragile egos and down-to-earth fashion advice while she penetrates the secrets of the magazine's agony page and follows a tortuous trail of clues to a suitably unexpected conclusion. -- Adelaide Advertiser
About the Author
Kerry Greenwood is the author of thirty-eight novels and six non-fiction books. Among her many honors, Ms. Greenwood has received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Crime Writers' Association of Austrialia. Other mysteries In the Phryne Fisher series available from Poisoned Pen Press are Murder in Montparnasse, Cocaine Blues, Flying too High, Murder on the Ballarat Train, Death at Victoria Dock, Ruddy Gore, and Urn Burial. She is also the author of several books for young adults and the Delphic Women series.
When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates’ Courts for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.