Night Work King, Laurie R.

San Francisco, 1924. A woman is found dead on Telegraph Hill, her body arranged with chilling precision. Enter Kate Martinelli — not a flapper dancing through the Jazz Age, but a detective navigating a city where women in her profession are rare and unwelcome. Laurie R. King, best known for her Mary Russell series, delivers a standalone mystery that trades Victorian fog for Prohibition-era grit. The investigation pulls Kate through speakeasies and society parlors, each clue revealing how little the city's glittering surface conceals its rot. King's historical eye is sharp, her prose unfussy, and her protagonist refuses to be charming just to earn your sympathy. This isn't a cozy mystery — it's a procedural that trusts you to keep up. For readers who like their crime fiction atmospheric, their detectives complex, and their 1920s less Great Gatsby, more real work after dark.