Judging from the cover art of Death Was the Other Woman I expected a hardcore, Depression-Era noir, but this stylish and atmospheric first-person mystery defies easy expectations. Instead of tough-guy prose and a private investigator protagonist, Linda L. Richards offers something terrifically different.

Meet spirited narrator Katherine (Kitty) Pangborn, the deft young secretary of a L.A. detective/ WWI veteran named Dexter Theroux. Born to prosperity and educated accordingly, Kitty's life has been full of devastating reversals. When her widower father commits suicide after losing everything to the turbulent financial market of 1929, Kitty must fend for herself—which she does by getting a job with the down-on-his-luck investigator Dexter.

Though hardly a model of prosperity, Dexter, when sober, possesses considerable investigative skills. Together with the clever Kitty, he agrees to take on a seemingly routine case involving spying on a client's philandering husband. Nothing is as it seems though, and soon Dex and Kitty are traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco to verify the identity of a corpse and to track down a missing man. Plot twists abound, as Kitty takes the initiative to solve the mystery. Elegant prose and well-rounded characters make this fresh take on the old PI tale a real find.