RED, WHITE, AND BLUE MURDER

Young Swedish housemaid Hilda Johansson's turn-of-the-century South Bend, Indiana, was more like a cozy household disrupted by murder in her first outing (Death in Lacquer Red, 1999). But recent labor rumblings have turned the factory town's streets meaner during a dog day summer a year later, when a well-known contractor is found dead and wrapped in a US flag on the construction site of the new city hall. Because President McKinley's assassin, immigrant anarchist Leon Czolgosz, had recently been in South Bend, police assume the contractor was a target of local political anarchists. Hilda's household peers are shaken both by the arrest of Norah's brother, their co-worker, for the murder and by rumors of unrest at the Studebaker family factory. Only the patriarchal hand of Hilda's beloved employer, Clem Studebaker, could calm the storm, but he’s ailing and away from home. So hard-driving Hilda sorts out clues from Red herrings, sorting through her own complicated loyalties to Clem and class as well. While Hilda and her network—the servants working for prominent South Bend families, the web of Swedish siblings and Lutheran churchgoers, her Irish fireman friend Patrick and his police contacts—do the work and take the risks, it takes another city magnate to quell an anti-immigrant mob and sell the solution.

Dams' new series hasn't yet found a happy balance between its politics and its puzzle. Its concept is too rich and potentially consequential for the cozy home she wants to give it. And Hilda herself is just a little too sharp not to cut up the cushions.