So THIS was the book that initially got me on the Anna Blanc train, and it was so freaking cool that I ended up getting to listen to the rest of the series. As you can see, this is the second novel in the Anna Blanc trilogy – which I hope there are more books coming out soon! I like Anna for some crazy reason – and for some reason I didn’t write my thoughts immediately after I finished listened to it, so these are definitely just thoughts that I remember having after a few weeks. Wish me luck!

Thank you again so much to Audiobookworm Promotions for having me on this series tour! Click on the banner for the entire tour schedule and information on all three books.

Los Angeles, 1908. In Chinatown, the most dangerous beat in LA, police matron Anna Blanc and her former sweetheart, Detective Joe Singer, discover the body of a white missionary woman, stuffed in a trunk in the apartment of her Chinese lover. If news about the murder gets out, there will be a violent backlash against the Chinese. Joe and Anna work to solve the crime quietly and keep the death a secret, reluctantly helped by the good-looking Mr. Jones, a prominent local leader.

Meanwhile, the kidnapping of two slave girls fuels existing tensions, leaving Chinatown poised on the verge of a bloody tong war. Joe orders Anna to stay away, but Anna is determined to solve the crime before news of the murder is leaked and Chinatown explodes.

Disclaimer: I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by Jennifer Kincheloe. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.

Like I was saying before, this was the first book that I listened to about Anna Blanc, and even though there were some things that she did that I was NOT happy about, I liked her as a whole. I think she was actually pretty smart in her own way, and the fact that she was able to learn about the human body and causes of death from reading medical textbooks without any help whatsoever or any prior experience was freaking awesome. I don’t think I could just read something over and over and then comprehend something as technical and dense as that. So good on her.

I think she actually had a lot of logic in her thought process when it came to the cases she was “working” – since of course this was the legit early 1900s in California and women were not allowed to do a lot of things. She was only a police matron, and that reduced her to working with women and children – which nothing wrong with that but she wasn’t actually working on any cases. She just made sure that the women that were in jail were cleaned up or fed, and that the children that were orphaned or anything were sent to the orphanage. Those are both good things that needed to happen, but she wasn’t seen as a detective in any of their eyes, and whenever she would try to tell someone of her thoughts or any evidence that she may have found, they would just brush her off.

Do you know how infuriating that was to listen to?! Ugh, and then she would be RIGHT with her theories and all that. And of course who got to take the damn credit? Yep, all the stupid men in the police force.

Okay clearly I had to rant a little bit about it, but I think I’m done now.

I’m so glad that Quirk was the same narrator in this one! She does an amazing job and I can’t wait to listen to more books that she narrates. I think she does a great job with this historical fiction mystery type novels, and I’m curious to see if she does other genres as well.