Halfway around the world, war has begun, but for Dorie Lennox, a newly-minted private-eye on her first tail, danger is more immediate. The dark streets of Kansas City of 1939 offer swing music, fast cars, gangsters, and the chance to forget about the Depression and her own murky past. But first Dorie must conquer her fears and save a woman on a bridge high above the muddy Missouri. When the woman takes a dive, Dorie is thrown into a quickly unraveling scam that offers salvation to few - and misery to plenty - in the high stakes world of machine politics and desperation deals. Lennox's path to Kansas City is full of detours, a brush with the law, a lost family, an aborted university and track career. But she's found a home of sorts in the Italian neighborhood of the Market, in a boardinghouse full of souls as lost and quirky as her own. Her switchblade goes everywhere with her, even as a rabbit's foot for luck, and sometimes as much more. Her boss, Amos Haddam, was a British soldier in World War I. Lost behind the lines he was gassed and has the scarred lungs to prove it. When he lands in the hospital, Lennox must carry the ball, clearing Haddam's name and finding who is playing her for a sucker. With vivid, sure prose and sharp dialogue, the world of Dorie Lennox comes alive, behind the wheel of her Packard, into the packinghouses, race tracks, and mansions of Kansas City. The landscape of America, the homefront of World War II, is evoked in a thoughtful, forceful mystery that lingers for the force of characters and keen sharpness of a slice of history through the perceptive, compassionate eyes of Dorie Lennox.

Europe is at war. Nazi bombers are hammering London. Wendell Willkie is giving Roosevelt a run for his money. In Kansas City, Dorie and her partner Amos are trying to keep the blonde and beautiful Thalia Hines from destroying herself. It's not easy. The girl has every reason to escape the cold stone mansion where her mother lies dying. Eveline Hines was a decorated war nurse during the First World War. Now she's struggling to protect her only daughter from men who lust over her inheritance even more than her curves. An old friend of Amos', Eveline is slipping away from cancer while her daughter carouses in the swank nightclubs and back alley bars of the city. Like The Big Sleep another mystery surfaces. In the rich milieu of a bygone time, themes as far-reaching as American fascists, a third-term president, and an America preparing for war, provide color for the intimate portrait of a powerful woman bearing witness to the destruction of all she loves. For the Hines family, nothing will ever be the same in this powerful story of maternal love and family secrets and the disastrous attempts to mingle them. Sweet and Lowdown is a historical mystery full of darkness and the peculiar heartache of the wayward child a story that will stay with the reader long after the book is closed.