Synopses & Reviews
Tears of the Dragon launches a new cozy series set in Chicago where the Browne family, mother and four daughters, hold things together in the face of the Depression. Their essential niceness makes a nice contrast to the gangsters and grit so often associated with this time and place.
Elodie Browne, the family bread-winner, thinks herself lucky to have a job, so she ignores sinister noises down the hall as her elevator opens on the wrong floor of her office building one night.
Then for a lark--and extra cash--she takes a job serving at a party given by Lee Chang, an importer of antiques and jade. The evening is disturbed by a dying man who stumbles in raving about ""Ming Dao."" What's that? Elodie's curiosity is up...a mistake.
Review
When you think about crime in Chicago in the 1930s, it's bootleggers and gangsters who come to mind, not tong wars and Chinese politics. One of the delights of ""Tears of the Dragon,"" Holly Baxter's first book in a proposed series of mysteries about a Chicago family struggling to survive the Depression, is the way she plants a rare and colorful Asian flower in
the overused ground of the period. Elodie Browne, a promising writer, supports her widowed mother and three sisters with a low-paying job in an office in a huge new building largely emptied by the financial upheavals of the day. Her friend Bernice, a flighty but generous young woman, earns a bit more working for a Chinese importer of antiques and jade. Browne goes through several genre staples, like finding a body and witnessing a murder. But what really earns the early raves the book has received is the way Baxter (a pseudonym for Paula Gosling, an American
writer who lives in England and has won several awards there) blends her ingredients--Chinese spices and familiar Midwestern fare--into a tasty and
original dish. -- Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune, June 26, 2005
Synopsis
""Tears of the Dragon"" launches an intelligent new cozy series set in Chicago, where the Browne family holds things together in the midst of the Depression. When Elodie Browne takes a job serving at a party given by an importer of antiques and jade, the evening is disturbed--and the mystery begins--as a dying man stumbles in raving about ""Ming Dao.""
Synopsis
"Realistic characters, natural dialogue, well-integrated historical detail and a surprise twist ending mark this as superior mystery fare."--Publishers Weekly STARRED review
To think of Chicago in the 1930s is to conjure up pictures of the Chicago Outfit and its earlier crime lords like Capone. Even the storied history of the Cubs or of the city's merchant princes and philanthropists can't quite shake the city's gritty image.
It's time for a new look. And here it is, a mystery with a warm family of widowed mother and four daughters at its core. Elodie, the Browne family bread-winner, lacks direct experience with crime, but she's full of curiosity, sharply observant, and nobody's fool. So when a man stumbles into a party given by a Chinese importer of jade and antiques where she is working "for a lark--and extra cash" and utters a dying word--mingdow--she begins to connect the murder with some odd doings in the office building where she works, events that began one night when the elevator door opened on the wrong floor....
Synopsis
"Tears of the Dragon" launches an intelligent new cozy series set in Chicago, where the Browne family holds things together in the midst of the Depression. When Elodie Browne takes a job serving at a party given by an importer of antiques and jade, the evening is disturbed--and the mystery begins--as a dying man stumbles in raving about "Ming Dao."
About the Author
Holly Baxter is an award-winning author born in Detroit who is excited to be starting a cozy series set in 1930s Chicago which will appeal to fans of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series. Her previous work has won both the Creasey Dagger for Best First Novel and a Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association.