Phryne Fisher #3

Phryne and Dot, her maid, are traveling to Ballarat via train (no spoilers here, folks). But there’s one problem – there’s a bad smell and everyone in first class is passed out. Luckily, our hero(ine) Phryne stays awake long enough to shoot out a window, alert the engineer, and rescue most of her fellow passengers. Well, except one – the mean old lady who spent the whole time complaining and being nasty to her daughter. They were in the first car, where the chloroform was deployed. The daughter has burns on her face, and mom’s missing. But not for long. Her battered and broken body is found down the tracks.

Meanwhile, there is a young girl no one knows, including herself, wandering around the station. Phryne takes them both in, and heads back to Melbourne to begin investigating the murder as well as the young girl’s situation. The daughter of the murdered woman is recovering from her burns, but is afraid that her younger, poor, medical student fiancé will still love her (hmmmm). Phryne has her suspicions about the boyfriend, as well as about the way the young girl was treated and how she came to lose her memory.

Phryne does her usual investigation with her motley collection of helpers, takes a quick lover (as she always does), and wears a series of fabulous outfits during it all. There’s fun, frivolity, and danger in equal measures, plus she ends up adopting the little girl as well as another girl who may have ended up in the same predicament.

I really need to find the shows on streaming somewhere (Netflix? Amazon? Wherever?) so I can see how these things play out visually. I know what they look like in my head, but there are people who actually blog about what Phryne wears in these things, so that would surely be worth a gander.