The Strange Files of Fremont Jones (A Fremont Jones Mystery) » (Reprint)

Brave, resourceful, adventurous Fremont (née Caroline) Jones is a woman ahead of her time. Hungry for independence, she's traded in her conventional life in Boston for a career as a "type-writer" in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. But Fremont soon discovers that her clients aren't always what they appear to be, and that in doing her job she's transcribing her way into a wealth of mystery--and mortal danger....

Dashing lawyer Justin Cameron well-nigh sweeps Fremont Jones off her feet--and into a situation ripe with perilous intrigue. A client meets an untimely death that Fremant suspects is linked to the paper she typed for him, of which she can recall but one small fragment. And her attempts to disentangle reality and imagination in the gothic tales penned by Edgar Allan Partridge--whose demeanor is one of terror under the barest restraint--send her up the rocky California coast on a mission of discovery from which she may not return....

A riveting, atmospheric mix of intrigue and humor introduces a new investigator as cultivated as Sherlock Holmes and as spunky as Kinsey Millhone.

Over My Dead Body.com - J. Ashley

...The first in the Fremont Jones series and won the Macavity Award for best first novel....Strangely, I found this book to be a mixture of the refreshingly original and the annoyingly cliche. Why, oh why, when sleuths are handed A Vital Clue, in the form of a letter, diary, computer disk, what-have-you, does their insatiable curiosity suddenly disappear, and they refuse to read said letter and/or carelessly lose it? The Vital Clue that would have explained all had they but taken the time...