“Her family looked, to Norma, like the inside of a train station, with everyone rushing off in a different direction on separate timetables. Even with a hammer in hand and a mouthful of nails, she couldn’t fix them into place.”

Miss Kopp Investigates is the seventh book in the Kopp Sisters series by NYT best-selling American author, Amy Stewart. It’s early 1919, and each of the Kopp sisters has plans: Norma intends to join her friend Aggie Bell to act as interpreter and do relief work for refugees in Belgium; Constance will be in Washington, training female recruits for the Bureau of Investigation; and Fleurette has a lucrative singing contract for herself and her green Amazonian parrot with Freeman Bernstein.

But those grand plans have to be put on hold, indefinitely, when their brother, Francis dies suddenly, leaving a wife, two young children and, it turns out, another on the way. And, apparently, a string of debts around the town of Hawthorne.

Norma immediately takes charge, coordinating the sale of their farm, the purchase of a house and the running of two households. Constance takes a position as a store detective. Under the cover of seamstressing jobs, Fleurette, without compromising her virtue or revealing her identity, regularly poses for photographs in the arms of men seeking a divorce, for a Paterson law firm.

If they knew, her sisters would not approve. Her earnings, Fleurette unobtrusively and efficiently applies to those debts her brother has accrued with the town’s retailers. During the course of this scheme, Fleurette encounters a client she believes is the victim of a scam, and she can’t resist investigating.

In this instalment, Norma and Constance are very much in the background although, together with their sister-in-aw, Bessie, they do manage to uncover the source of the massive debt with which Francis has unintentionally saddled his family. It’s very much a team effort: where Norma’s forcefulness fails, Constance’s flattery or Bessie’s quiet tenacity win out.

But Fleurette is undeniably the star of this book, having blossomed from the self-centred teenager we met in 1914 to a resourceful, considerate and much more mature, if still occasionally wilful, young woman. She flexes her independence muscles by quitting the family home; her investigations see her consulting a fortune teller, parting with an emerald pendant and ultimately, lead to her arrest.

Era and plot give Stewart plenty of opportunities to remind us of just how powerless women were then: “The police won’t take her complaint unless Mr. Martin comes in as well. If she went to them by herself, the first thing they’d do is go around and talk to the husband and make sure the missus isn’t just hysterical. They’re not going to go running off to chase after an imaginary swindler on her word alone.”

Stewart’s Historical Notes are interesting and informative, revealing that Constance Kopp and her sisters were real people, much as described, as are quite a few of the other characters. Many of the events that form the plot also occurred, if not always when stated. Stewart takes the known historical facts and fleshes them out into a marvellous tale. Fans will be pleased to read that Stewart has plenty more up her literary sleeve for the Kopp sisters. Delightful!!
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt