Smoke and Mirrors
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Phineas T. Barnum's sister must solve a murder in 19th-century New York City in this historical mystery from the author of the Pepper Martin mysteries.
Evie Barnum oversees her brother's American Museum, a place teeming with scientific specimens and "human prodigies" including a bearded woman and the lizard man. In this weird and whacky workplace, Evie hopes she can easily bury her secrets.
But when an old friend shows up and begs for her help, she does all she can to stay away. The next time she sees him, he is dead in front of the exhibit of the Feejee Mermaid. Suspicion for the murder falls on Jeffrey, known as the Lizard Man, but Evie knows it isn't possible.
After Jeffrey disappears, Evie becomes determined to solve the mystery of her friend's murder, even if it brings her face to face with a past she is desperate to hide…
"[An] appealing heroine…. Amusing and eye-opening historical details complement a mystery that's appropriately melodramatic."—Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evangeline "Evie" Barnum, the appealing heroine of this series launch from Daniels (Graveyard Shift and nine other Pepper Martin mysteries), works for her showman brother, Phineas T. Barnum, at his American Museum in Manhattan, which exhibits live animals, waxwork dummies, and fossils, along with such human oddities as Bess the Bearded Lady. One morning in 1842, Andrew Emerson, a friend from the Barnum family's hometown of Bethel, Conn., shows up at the museum. He begs Evie to help him with a problem, but she brushes him off, unwilling to engage in what might lead to embarrassing questions about her abrupt departure from Bethel two years earlier. When Evie later finds Andrew lying dead with a curious head wound near the mermaid exhibit, suspicion falls on Jeffrey Hollister, the Lizard Man of Borneo. Evie's desire to clear Jeffrey's name soon leads her into a murky criminal underworld. Her intriguing backstory makes her particularly sensitive to inequities in the lives of women. Amusing and eye-opening historical details complement a mystery that's appropriately melodramatic.)
