Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

By M. Louisa Locke

This book and I got off to a rough start. I loved the title. I loved the premise. I love San Francisco, and I love historical/period mysteries and strong female leads. Seems like we should have been a match made in heaven.

Annie Fuller is a young widow living in San Francisco in 1879. Her late husband had squandered her fortune before committing suicide a few years earlier. She owns and manages a boarding house to make ends meet, and also supplements her income as Madame Sibyl, a well-known clairvoyant.

When one of Annie’s clients is found dead, all signs point to suicide, but Annie isn’t so sure that that’s the case, and she winds up doing some amateur sleuthing to try to determine what really happened. She butts heads with Nate Dawson, the deceased’s family lawyer who is also trying to learn the truth, and to her horror, begins to fall for him.

This book does have a few entertaining moments, and the historical detail is apparent throughout, but the flow of the story was too slow for my personal taste, and I came perilously close to giving up on it more than once. I can be stubborn, however, and so kept on reading, in hopes that something interesting would happen.

While I do appreciate details, especially in a period mystery, it felt to me like there were far too many details that were not relevant to the story. I didn’t like Annie for most of the book, although the flirtation between Annie and Nate was kind of sweet, and I must doff my cap to Nate’s investigative skills.

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this book, but the ending of the mystery itself was nicely done, and I could just picture the scene in my head where the tables were turned on the killer and the killer was incapacitated in time for the police to arrive.

All opinions are my own. No compensation was received for this review.