Hi, this is Stacie Frobenius with a BookByte for Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart. When choosing books for this series, I tried to pick books that I had already read and known were good. I hadn’t read this book or had it recommended to me.
It was the result of an Amazon search for books about detectives. Amy Stewart takes a true news article about one of our nation’s first female crime fighters, Constance Kopp and weaves a story around the events surrounding her time in the spotlight.
The story begins in 1914 when a well-connected racketeer runs his automobile into their buggy in a crash that breaks the silence of the quiet dirt road. Constance and her sisters don’t have the money to pay for the repairs. So she decides to hold Mr. Kaufman accountable to the damage he caused and sends him a bill. Well, Mr. Kaufman doesn’t want to pay so he and his friends decide to escalate the issue with vandalism and threats. The book takes us through the events until the real-life resolution is made.
The book had charming parallels to my life. Three women. Three different personalities. I can relate to those dynamics. I have two sisters and we all have our unique talents. Our three women in the story are taking care of a farmstead on their own in defiance of the times, having no men to help. Our main character Constance is headstrong, and she didn’t mind being in a man’s world.
She held her own, especially when she was with Sheriff Heath. She didn’t expect him to fix her problems, she expected to fix her problems by herself with the Sheriff by her side. Fleurette was the girly-girl who could get things done by batting her eyes. She reminded the other women that they were women and could have fun once in a while. And Norma was the serious care-taker of the animals on the farm. However, she probably felt she was more of a caretaker of the other two women.
I didn’t read the author’s note until the very end. In it, Stewart talks about which story-lines were true and which were fiction. All details are woven seamlessly to create a story that isn’t too dramatized but applicable for the early 1900s. A sub-story about Constance and Fleurette was woven in with the main story and it left me wondering if it too was based on a true account. I like to think it was.
If you chose this book, I ask that you look at the picture of Constance provided in the back of the book. I regret not looking at her picture until the end. Constance looks tough and curious. And I think she would’ve done well in law enforcement. Those subtle details of Constance’s personality that Stewart gets right, were those. I also enjoyed her representation of Sheriff Heath.
He was committed to helping the community and fighting the wrong in it. In a time where law enforcement operated more in the grey than the black and white, he didn’t have to fight the bad guys. He probably could’ve taken a bribe for it to go away.
But he chose to be the good guy. He chose to support three women who already had a hard life. Sheriff Heath also made sacrifices. His men made sacrifices. I can’t help but think that in today’s law enforcement world, Officers wouldn’t be available to watch someone’s house for several months. In addition, they wouldn’t be handing out firearms to the public to protect themselves. Oh, how times have changed.
Overall, this book was an easy read and entertaining. Amy Stewart went on to write other books about the Kopp sisters. I will be sure to put those on my reading list.
