Redheaded Reviews: Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart

In the last book set in 1915, Constance Kopp is promised a sheriff's deputy's badge by Sheriff Heath, making her the first lady deputy in the state. But when this book opens Constance is doing the work of a female deputy, but without the badge. Her main job is as the jailhouse matron for the female prisoners. One of the male prisoners, Herman Albert von Matthesius, who has posed as a doctor and did horrible things but is in jail for theft and received a year of jail time. While there he would insist on speaking German and the only person who spoke German was Constance so she would be called in to interpret for him.

Then he got sick and the county had refused the Sheriff a doctor for the jail, so they had to send Matthesius to the hospital. He would only speak in German so Constance was called to the hospital to translate. A train had had an accident injuring at least half a dozen people so the hospital was jumping. Deputy English, whom Constance doesn't think too highly of, escorts her the hospital room. English wants to leave and go help the Sheriff so she tells him to go ahead and he does. She questions Matthesius about his complaints and he tells her of his problems. She steps outside to look for a doctor and to guard the door. Then the lights go out and things really become chaotic. Just then Sheriff Heath arrives and they go to check on the prisoner and he's gone. Heath sends his deputies out to search for him and he sends Constance home.

He had finally given her something really big to do and she blew it. Constance wants to hide under her covers but her two sisters Norma and Fleurette won't let her. Well, sister and daughter, though Fleurette doesn't know that she's her daughter. That's another thing that she has to worry about now that Fleuette is eighteen-years-old and while she enrolled her into a school for the dramatic arts to keep her busy she is taking to it very seriously and is coming into contact with dashing young men whose intentions are perhaps all too clear. And she wants to run off to New York City to become an actress. Whatever are Norma and Constance to do with Fleurette? But then Norma and Fleurette convince Constance to go out and capture Matthesius herself and redeem herself and perhaps get her badge in the process.

She starts off going to the place where the sheriff has already gone to but it provided no answers. She went to a friend of hers in New York City who is a photographer whom she thought might have followed the story, but he had no information for her except that she should follow the names in the crime and ask them herself what happened since the papers didn't report it in great detail and the sheriff never told her. So she hunts down the three young men involved in this horrible act and finds out the truth which helps her get a step closer to Matthesius and helps to redeem herself in the eyes of some of the deputies.

Constance is more than a character in that she really lived and this case really happened, though not entirely the way Stewart depicts it in her book. Stewart took newspaper clippings and brought them to life to tell the story of a dangerous criminal who escaped from jail and how Constance hunted him down alongside Sheriff Heath and how the Freeholders of the town were calling to have the sheriff put in jail if the prisoner wasn't found which was the law back then. There is also the story of one of the female jail inmates who is accused of murder who the local detective has found evidence that shows she is innocent, but whom the woman herself swears she did it. It's up to Constance to get to the bottom of it. This book is just as good as the last book which was fantastic. These sisters are such interesting characters and the fact that they really lived just adds to it. Constance's need to prove herself in a man's world doing a job that she loves and fighting to keep doing it really speaks to me as a woman, but it has universal themes to anyone who feels that life has given them the short end of the stick. This is an amazing book and I highly recommend it. I give it five out of five stars.

Quotes

It was the belief of Sheriff Heath and some of the more reform-minded sheriffs in the state that the criminal mind could be rehabilitated by imposing order upon a disordered life. According to this line of thinking, women committed fewer crimes precisely because their days were filled with domestic duties.

-Amy Stewart (Lady Cop Makes Trouble p 35)

It occurred to me that there was something about a man in his late thirties. He was old enough to know his own mind and still young enough to do something about it.

-Amy Stewart (Lady Cop Makes Trouble p 46)

Yes, well he’s a man of limited intellect, and if he had more than one idea at a time they’d die from overcrowding.

-Amy Stewart (Lady Cop Makes Trouble p 71)