Silence Is Golden (Hilda Johansson Mystery Series, Volume 4)

Jeanne M. Dams

ISBN 10: 0736687092 ISBN 13: 9780736687096

Publisher: Books on Tape, 2002

Synopsis

"The good old days" aren't all they're cracked up to be...at least in Jeanne M. Dams's turn-of-the-century novels. Her woman on the spot, Hilda Johansson, a maid in the Studebaker household in South Bend, sees what's going on among the rich, suffers what's going on among the less fortunate...and has no trouble telling it like it is. In the fourth in this series, Hilda's situation is still fragile. She's still crammed into a small house with her family of seven, and her happiness at being reunited with them is bittersweet. Worst of all, her 12-year-old brother, Eric, can't hold a job. When a friend of Eric's runs away to join the circus and is found beaten, perhaps worse, events take a desperate turn.

About this title

From Booklist

(*Starred Review*) Here's the latest Hilda Johanson mystery, and it's a real corker. The time is 1903; the circus is in town (South Bend, Indiana); and Fritz, a friend of Hilda's younger brother, decides he wants to join up and become a trapeze artist. Then the real trapeze artists, the Stupendous Shaws, disappear. So does Fritz, who eventually turns up hiding in a barn, brutally beaten and claiming that he was abused. To make matters even more confusing, Hilda's brother, Erik, also vanishes. Can Hilda find her little brother? What happened to the Stupendous Shaws, and are they responsible for the goings-on in South Bend? In a genre with no shortage of amateur sleuths in period costume, Hilda is one of the most memorable: a maid in the household of the fabulously wealthy Studebaker family, a Swedish girl still relatively new to the U.S. (and still fumbling with her English), a totally unlikely detective. The secret to Dams' success is in the details: she plunks us firmly down in early-twentieth-century Indiana. We learn, without realizing we're being taught anything at all, about social customs, class divisions, even the day-to-day operations of a wealthy turn-of-the-century household. Great characters, fascinating history, compelling mystery: this series could go on forever. David Pitt
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From Publishers Weekly

Swedish maid and sometime South Bend, Ind., sleuth Hilda Johansson has a personal stake in solving her latest mystery: her brother Erik is having trouble getting used to their adopted country, and he may be hiding a deadly secret. Tackling Protestant/Catholic conflicts, rich/poor dynamics and a criminal act that's in the headlines today, a century later, with equal alacrity, the Agatha Award-winning author of the Dorothy Martin series, Jeanne M. Dams, offers up another one of her mysteries with a social conscience in Silence Is Golden.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Books on Tape
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0736687092
• ISBN 13: 9780736687096
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 6