THE FAMILY WAY

Neither retirement nor pregnancy can put a good detective out to pasture.

Molly Murphy Sullivan has promised her police captain husband, Daniel, that she’ll quit investigating and settle down to become a housewife. Restless and uncomfortable in the heat of a New York City summer, she gets a letter addressed to her old agency: A couple from Ireland want her to find their niece Maureen O’Byrne, who worked for the Mainwaring family before she went missing. Surely Daniel won’t mind her asking a few innocent questions? But her husband is furious when she witnesses a baby kidnapping—one of the cases he’s working—while visiting a domestic agency in search of a maid. He wants her to travel to cooler Westchester, stay with his mother and give up detective work. Daniel would be even more angry if he knew that Molly had gone back to the agency, trying to track down the Mainwarings, and bumped into her younger brother Liam, who’s on the run from the English and illegally in the country on business for the Brotherhood, which will do anything to gain independence for Ireland. Molly agrees to go to Westchester when she learns that the Mainwarings live nearby. She asks her two neighbors to come stay at a nearby inn so that she’ll have an excuse to get away from her mother-in-law and keep sleuthing, a decision that will put her life in danger.

Feisty Molly (Hush Now, Don’t You Cry, 2012, etc.) unravels another knotty case while providing insight into life just after the turn of that other century.