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Start giftingA Dangerous Business
Narrator
Thérèse Plummer
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
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Length
7 hours 47 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Jane Smiley once again shows she is a natural born storyteller in this skillfully told story of a young women who finds herself a widow (something she is happy about), far from home and from her strait-laced Christian parents, working as a prostitute in the 1850’s gold rush era wild west town of Monterey. Smiley manages to describe Eliza’s job as a prostitute and the acts she performs and the way the men she services act in the primmest most old-fashioned way you can imagine. Listening to it made me laugh out loud. While there is a mystery (prostitutes are being murdered and no one cares) that was not the only theme of the book. The book was about Eliza, her friend Jean, her boss Mrs. Parks and how women learned to be strong and how to cope in a world where they were treated like slaves – often by their own husbands – and had no way to support themselves. This was a feel-good story about a time and a place from a perspective and viewpoint not often seen. It was a surprisingly beautiful story given the subject matter. The narration was spot on and really helped to bring the story to life.”
— Nancy • Fiction Addiction
Summary
“Mrs. Parks was often paid in gold dust, but she paid her girls in dollars …”
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls
Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained
what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can’t resist confronting. Side by side with her friend Jean, and inspired by her reading,
especially by Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, Dupin, Eliza pieces together an array of clues to try to catch the killer, all the while juggling clients who begin to seem more and more suspicious.
Eliza and Jean are determined not just to survive, but to find their way in a nascent town on the fringes of the Wild West—a bewitching combination of beauty and danger—as what will become the Civil War looms on the horizon. As
Mrs. Parks says, “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business, but between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
