New Book – Entangled Threads – Victorian San Francisco Mystery 8 – by M. Louisa Locke (Pages 1 – 68)

First Posted: 2022

This new book in the series stars in some woollen mills.

Meghan Wilson works the night shift, and when she realises that her partner Lily has been gone for too long, she goes to find her, but then she falls to the flames of a fire in the drying room. It is not clear if she has been pushed or not.

Annie has been hired to do an audit to the mills where he has invested a large amount of money because he is worried not everything is good. The owners of the mill is two brothers, Douglas and Hugh McKenzie. Then Biddy, who is Meghan’s cousin and also Tilly’s, comes to the boardinghouse to ask Annie help because her cousin needs help from the women’s dispensary. She was sent home from hospital, and she is in agony. So thanks to Annie’s intervention, Dr Blair goes to see Meghan and prescribes laudanum for her pain.

Biddy, who works for Mr Livingstone in the emporium, is not happy to discover that there is something suspicious in Meghan’s accident. So when she is offered a job at the mills, she accepts, thinking that she could investigate. In reality Biddy was thinking of quitting her post at the emporium because she started walking out with Christopher Finch, and it seems that the man seems to have done something to her the same day when Meghan had the accident. When Biddy goes to see Annie that night, Kathleen, who is a good friend of Biddy’s, disapproves of her decision to leave a good job at the emporium for one at the mills.

Now Nate is working on a case. Miss Ada Bateson was promised to inherit part of her mother’s fortune in the event of her death, but she has been left out of the will. The heirs are her two younger brothers, Lyman and Dwight. Nate tells her and the man who accompanies her, Roger Truman, that under Californian law Ada has a right to a third part of her mother’s estate. When Ada and Roger talk to her brother, Lyman, who is the executor, he doesn’t agree and threatens her. When Roger goes to see Nate, he clearly doesn’t want Ada to go through a legal process because he claims Ada has been overprotected all her life, and this could hurt her. When Nate tells Annie later, he thinks that Roger Truman is hiding something from him.

Interesting start, and I am glad to get reacquainted with these darling characters.