Murder is a Collector's Item (Emma Marsh Mysteries) [Paperback]

From the back cover
"Completely enjoyable"—New York Times. "Fast and funny."—The New Yorker. Twenty-six-year-old Emma Marsh isn’t much at spelling or geography and perhaps she butchers the odd literary quotation or two, but she’s a keen judge of character and more than able to hold her own when it comes to selling antiques or solving murders. When she stumbles upon the body of a rich collector on the floor of the Boston antiques shop where she works, suspicion quickly falls upon her missing boss. Emma knows Jeff Graham is no murderer, but veteran homicide cop Jerry Donovan doesn’t share her conviction. With a little help from Hank Fairbanks, her wealthy boyfriend and would-be criminologist, Emma turns sleuth and cracks the case, but not before a host of cops, reporters and customers drift through the shop on Charles Street, trading insults and sipping scotch as they talk clues, prompting a New York Times reviewer to remark that Emma "drinks far more than a nice girl should." Emma does a lot of things that women didn’t do in detective novels of the 1930s. In an age of menopausal spinsters, deadly sirens, admiring wives and air-headed girlfriends, pretty, big-footed Emma Marsh stands out. She’s a precursor of the independent women sleuths that finally came into their own in the last two decades of this century. Originally published in 1939, Murder is a Collector’s Item was the first of three books featuring Emma. Smoothly written and sparkling with dry, sophisticated humor, it combines an intriguing puzzle with an entertaining portrait of a self-possessed young woman on her own in Boston toward the end of the Great Depression. Author Dean, who worked in a Boston antiques shop, offers up an insider’s view of what that easily impressed Times reviewer called the "goofy" world of antiques. Lovejoy, the rogue antiques dealer in Jonathan Gash’s mysteries, would have loved Emma.