the plot suddenly began to unfold and Violet became more of an active participant, in stead of just a thinker. No Life For A Lady is driven by Violet’s determination to become a lady detective, but what pushes the character forward is the personal mystery surrounding her mother’s disappearance.

In an environment like this, where all the odds are stacked against her, Violet was a breath of fresh air. Ten years after her mother disappeared, she decided to hire a detective without her father's knowledge.The story starts when she is just a young girl and takes the reader all the way until around the time she's in her 60s or so (doesn't really say explicitly). No life for a lady is an engrossing historical mystery with a wonderful cast of characters (trust me, you want to meet Maria Monk, a former courtesan and an occasional sex-ed teacher) and a compelling storyline. Because Violet is a woman who knows her own mind - and her mind is on her mother, who went missing ten years earlier, vanishing from Hastings Pier without a trace. Her earliest recollection is of seeing a man on foot overtaken and shot down by a horseman directly in front of a doorstep on which she sat eating a slice of bread sprinkled with brown sugar; it and the victim fell into the same dust at the same instant.

There’s a good deal of humour in this tale, as well as a cute twist, a very dramatic climax, and plenty of scope for further stories featuring this cast. There’s a touch of Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell Mystery series to this book, whilst fans of TV series Miss Scarlet and the Duke will find much to enjoy here with a similarly spirited team-up that evokes the will-they-wont-they relationship between Victorian detectives Eliza and Duke. But there is no such thing as a lady detective, so Violet hires a professional to help, sparking a chain of events that risk not only Violet’s reputation, but unearths shocking secrets that some people will do anything to keep hidden.And while the book definitely picked up in the second half, the stark contrast between the two half definitely hurt the overall flow of the book.

The knowledge came crashing over me on that mundane walk home, with the force of a giant wave, that I wanted nothing more in the whole wide world than to be a Lady Detective. From time immemorial, American Indians had lived by raiding, whether of the natural bounty of the land or the garnered resources of their neighbors.

He was accidentally killed at thirtyeight by the one thing he was known ever to have been afraid of: to wit, a rifle supposed to be not loaded. Part rom-com, part mystery with a little comedy of manners thrown in, No Life for a Lady follows Violet Hamilton who lives with her father in the English seaside town of Hastings. This autobiography of life on a New Mexico cattle spread during the years 1880 to 1940 was fascinating. Loved hearing about a woman riding horseback all over the New Mexico territory—8 years old and riding 20 miles alone to get the mail and bear hunting on horseback as an adult. Cleaveland's style is warm, dry, and droll in this memoir of cattle herding on the New Mexico open range in the early 20th century.