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"Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner...to tinge it with romanticism...produces much the same effect as if you worked a love story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid." Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four
1900 had just begun when Miss Abigail Patience Danforth turned 18 and made her debut...as the world's first female consulting detective...and romance invaded the infant science of detection. |
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Dr. Conan Doyle himself had tried to discourage her, but when Abigail is a guest at Hunterswell House, The Punjat's Ruby (a gift for the Prince of Wales) is stolen, and she is pitched headlong into her first case.
Read an excerpt from "The Punjat's Ruby"
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The Punjat's Ruby |
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To Marshal Bill Tilghman's chagrin, it is Abigail who rescues him and recovers the famous lawman's prized Arabian stallion, using the modern telegraph to create a new method of tracking a killer across the wilderness.
Read an excerpt from "The Arabian Pearl"
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The Arabian Pearl |
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With the young writer, Jack London, as escort, Abigail dons a gentleman's disguise and braves San Francisco's seamy underworld to solve a murder.
Read an excerpt from "The Cat's Eye"
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The Cat's Eye |
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In Hawaii, Abigail nearly forfeits her life while rescuing the heir to a sugar fortune from fraudulent banishment to a leper colony and clearing her devoted servant, Kinkade, of murder charges.
Read an excerpt from "Diamond Head"
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Diamond Head |
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Abigail is a guest on a yacht, The Seascape, along with Houdini, when she is challenged to solve a "locked room" murder.
Read an excerpt from "The Sunken Treasure"
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The Sunken Treasure |
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