Clara Shortridge Foltz faces a patriarchal nemesis in 1884 San Francisco. When a white prostitute is murdered and flayed down to a skeleton, Clara is hired by the Six Companies of Chinatown to defend the sixteen males who are swept-up by the Chinatown Squad. This ragtag and corrupt group of sheriffs works for the mayor, Washington Bartlett. The mayor uses the nation’s anti-Chinese sentiment in his quest to win the race for Governor of California. Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar, must learn fast to become a detective in order to prove that her client, journalist George Kwong, is not the killer but was set-up by the mayor to take the fall. Along with Ah Toy, her trusted translator and best friend, she is instructed by the head of detectives, Captain Isaiah Lees. Lees becomes enamored with Clara, who is having personal problems with sexual commitment, due to her first marriage with Jeremiah Foltz. He was a Union vet who deserted Clara and their five children for a younger woman. Captain Lees has personal problems of his own, as he has devoted all his time fighting the corrupt politicians and the Chinatown Squad for twenty years, and has not even made time for female relations. Theirs is a very special kind of romance. Clara brings a national spotlight to bear on her case, as thousands of women flock to the City by the Bay to support her effort to win against these patriarchal forces. The Chinese are also oppressed, and Clara and Ah Toy become embroiled in a deadly came of cat-and-mouse to trap the real killer and save George Kwong. As a special bonus, you can read the first chapter in the second mystery of the series, The Spiritualist Murders, in which Clara and Ah Toy must find out why wives are under the spell of a magnetic and hypnotically attractive young spiritualist. These women are being awakened sexually by him and are then murdering their husbands to escape their lives of Victorian and male-dominated oppression.

“Madness can be seen as an intuitive probing into true reality.”–R. D. Laing Women were, among others, misdiagnosed as insane by alienists in the 1800s. My plot will involve a female child who has been institutionalized in 1887, but the aunt of this child comes to Clara Foltz to say she believes the child was admitted to the Stockton State Insane Asylum (the first such institution in California) because she knew about a murder that was committed on her wealthy parent’s estate. Clara solicits the help of Elizabeth Packard, the crusading (real) activist who was committed in the 1860s by her husband. It took Mrs. Packard three years to earn her freedom. Together with Ah Toy, they contrive a way to go undercover to gain admittance into the Women’s Building at Stockton to find the child and determine what happened to have her institutionalized. Children were regularly institutionalized, as were the elderly and the feeble-minded.

Author Margaret Atwood creates a dystopian future in The Handmaid's Tale. James Musgrave's sexist dystopia is based on fact. Attorney Clara Foltz's California legal team is chosen by President Grover Cleveland to defend a mulatto sufragette who has assassinated his Supreme Court nominee, Justice Marshal Owens. When her client is found dead in the jail cell, the hunt begins for the killer. "James Musgrave's The Angel's Trumpet is one of those rare historical mysteries that is both entirely plausible and yet truly original. A richly researched adventure into the complex social web of Gilded Age Washington, featuring deeply-realized and re-imagined luminaries including actress Sarah Bernhardt and President and Mrs. Cleveland, the novel is also surprisingly modern in its sensibilities, a compelling romp into an earlier era's struggle with addiction and vice and secrecy and race relations, and, most of all, hidden sources of power. You will read this book in one sitting—and you will be very glad that you did. A meticulously-plotted gem from a master of the genre." Jacob M. Appel, author of the Dundee International Book Award winner, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up.

In the fifth mystery of the best-selling and award-winning Portia of the Pacific series, Attorney and Detective Clara Shortridge Foltz and her partner, Attorney Laura de Force Gordon, become involved in two trials. One, an administrative case, Clara defends the accused, an abortifacient merchant, who is allegedly the incestuous father of a child by his sixteen-year-old daughter, who dies during an abortion attempt. But since this is 1887, no criminal charges can be made on the father, so the San Francisco police go after the midwife, a Chinese-American who treated the deceased, a half-Navajo girl, with acupuncture. Clara and Laura call in witnesses from the past, including a Medicine Man from the victim’s mother’s tribe in the Arizona Territory, the famous Claflin sisters, suffragists who live in England, and the State Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior. The supernatural curse of the tribe’s Skinwalker witches, in the form of a coyote, which allegedly can run on two legs like a man, and the strange practices of the Navaho Medicine man and his deaf assistant, cause this mystery to evolve into a much bigger conundrum than merely that of abortion. The search for truth will end on the Navaho Nation’s land, under less than ideal circumstances.

Boomtown San Diego, in 1888, erupts in murder by the retired Marshal and hero of the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp. What's really going on behind this murder? Can you find who's responsible when others can't? "Human trafficking earns global profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, $99 billion of which comes from commercial sexual exploitation. Globally, an estimated 71% of enslaved people are women and girls, while men and boys account for 29%." These stats come from 2021 around the world. However, this practice began in the Nineteenth Century, and in boomtowns across the West women were being used to make great profits for those in the community reaping money from the exploitation of sex sold to hard-working men, who usually outnumbered the female population 5-1 during the Gold and Silver Mining Era. This sixth mystery of the Portia of the Pacific series The Dancing Murders delves into a case that, at first, seems to involve legal prostitution madams in San Diego, but it soon becomes a much wider, and more complex mystery about whom is actually benefiting the most from these businesses and why. Several major historical characters are used by Musgrave to weave into his plot, including the "boomtown vagabonds," Wyatt Berry-Stapp Earp and his common law wife, Josephine Marcus Earp; Ida Bailey, notorious madam of the Stingaree district's Canary Cottage; the first mayor of San Diego, William Jefferson Hunsaker, who used to be Earp's attorney back in Tombstone, Arizona.With an extremely unique frame, Musgrave allows the reader to first explore the suspects and the issues through five chapters of prologue. Then, in a very Kurosawa-type twist, as in Rashomon, the reader/viewer gets to explore the psyches of the four main suspects, in chronological progression. However, deep within these characters, in their first-person narratives, lies the underlying truth of this entire mystery and how it will explode into the plot for the seventh mystery in this popular series. What is behind the murder plot, and how does attorney and detective Clara Shortridge Foltz go about investigating the leads? Are you better than she is at spotting what's going on in this twisted assortment of clues? Try one suspect to see if you're correct. However, even if you guessed correctly, unless you read all four narratives, you won't see the macrocosmic and ingenious plot for what it's worth. Only then will you see how Musgrave shines the first light on an issue that is grabbing headlines today. We may call it "persecution of Asians" in massage parlors. However, what about the sex-traffickers and ones who finance these types of businesses? History, says Musgrave, keeps repeating itself, and The Dancing Murders demonstrates, in colorful and mystifying ways, just how it all began.