This Dame for Hire

Faye Quick gets lucky when her boss joins the army and appoints her as his replacement. As a private eye in New York City in 1943, she deserves better understanding from reader Laura Hicks, who uses a caustic and brash tone for Faye's voice. None of the voices come readily or sympathetically to this narrator's lips. They are self-conscious and a beat apart from the story, so exaggerated at times that they break the author's rhythm and the listener's concentration. It's the mystery we want to hear and follow, not an awareness of how the reader will bring variety to yet another character. J.P. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 23, 2005
An original idea—a female PI working on her own in 1943—and an unusually imaginative portrait of a New York City coping, surviving, even thriving during WWII lift the first of a new suspense series from Scoppettone (Gonna Take a Homicidal Journey
). Faye Quick makes a tough and touching heroine, with a voice that just cries out for an actress like Ida Lupino to bring her to cinematic life. She starts as a secretary, learns everything her sleazy but charming boss knows about being a detective, then assumes charge of the agency after her employer is drafted. "Even though I looked
like any 26-year-old gal ankling round New York City in '43, there was one main difference between me and the rest of the broads," Faye tells us. "Show me another Jane who did my job and I'd eat my hat." This lively, slightly mocking tone continues at perfect pitch, as Quick finds the dead body of a missing young woman on a snowy street, then is hired by the victim's parents to catch the killer. There are echoes of Chandler and Hammett in the distance, but the plot offers some fresh surprises. Best of all, Quick's 1943 New York looks like old magazine and newspaper photographs come to life—not faded but enhanced by the passage of time. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy
.