The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange

One of Author Anna Katharine Green's innovations was the idea of the “girl detective,” in the person of Violet Strange. Violet was a 17-year-old high-society debutante who led a double life as a sleuth, working for an unnamed detective agency to discreetly ferret out solutions to mysteries that could not be trusted to the police. The short stories in this collection give us a glimpse into New York society, filled with musicales and teas and ballgowns, but neither the tales nor Violet are light-hearted and fluffy. Happy endings aren’t guaranteed, and we’re often left with a sense of melancholy. Some of the stories are even a bit macabre. But over a century later, the well-plotted, legally-accurate yarns still satisfy one’s desire for solid resolutions to seemingly insoluble mysteries.