Kerry Greenwood is the author of a popular series of mystery stories set in her native Australia in ther aftermath of World War I, featuring her amateur sleuth, the Honorable Phryne (rhymes with briney) Fisher.
In this novel, the eighteenth in the series, Phryne rescues a young and impetuous woman reporter from a beating for poking her nose into places where it is not welcome. When the reporter, in hot pursuit of an expose on pregnant young women vanishing from the so-called refuge provided by a convent of nums, mysteriously drops out of sight, Phryne and her "minions" --- the various orphans she's rescued and friends in high and low places she's picked up in the course of her adventures --- go looking for her. Phryne uncovers several different crimes and scandals during her insouciant investigations, but not the whereabouts of the young reporter.
Greenwood's Phryne has been compared to Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane, but I would rather compare her to the shallow and silly "noble sleuth" version of Lord Peter Wismey, before he encounters Harriet and becomes a real person. Far more interesting than Phryne or her improbable adventures are the historical descriptions of postWorld War I Australia that Greenwood embeds in her stories.
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