Emerson’s latest sees Spaulding go West

FATAL AS A FALLEN WOMAN, by Kathy Lynn Emerson, Pemberley Press, Corona del Mar, Calif., 2005, 274 pages, hardback, $24.95

Diana Spaulding is ready to settle down as the deadly winter of 1888 ebbs and spring peeks its head above the horizon. The crime reporter for the New York Independent Intelligencer has resigned her job, packed her bags and has accepted Dr. Ben Northcote’s marriage proposal.

The young widow wasn’t sure she could ever again entrust her heart to a man after her first marriage to an actor ended so tragically when he was murdered in a gambling house. The Bangor physician convinced her otherwise and Diana Spaulding is determined that nothing, not Ben’s mentally ill brother or his overbearing mother, will interfere with their happiness.

While focusing so intently on her future, the reporter forgot that her past still was nipping at her heels. And catch up with her it does in Kathy Lynn Emerson’s newest book in the Diana Spaulding mystery series, “Fatal as a Fallen Woman.”

Best known for her “Face Down” series featuring Elizabethan sleuth lady Susanna Appleton, the Wilton writer expanded her literary reach two years ago from the 16th to the 19th century. “Deadlier than the Pen,” the first of at least four books planned in the Diana Spaulding series, introduced the journalist, her lover, his family and her demanding but protective editor Horatio Foxe.

It is Foxe, who in the new novel, sends the reporter hurtling west to Denver and her past when he learns Diana’s mother is wanted for murdering her father. Because her parents disinherited their daughter when she married Evan Spaulding six years earlier, Diana is in for some shocking surprises when she arrives in the bustling city of 100,000, whose prosperity was fueled by gold strikes in the nearby Rocky Mountains.

As always, Emerson wraps her mystery around the history and social customs of the times. It is worth a trip to her Web site to review some of the fascinating sources used for “Fatal as a Fallen Woman” and to find out which of the characters were real people and which sprang from the author’s imagination.

For Maine readers, however, the trip West is a bit disappointing after the first Diana Spaulding mystery delved so thoroughly into the rich history of the Queen City. Colorado’s history is interesting, just not as fascinating as Bangor’s. The book, however, does a superb job of filling in the gaps of the reporter’s early life and explaining her husband’s death in more detail.

As in many of the books in her “Face Down” series, the mystery in “Fatal as a Fallen Woman” is secondary to the characters, Emerson vividly portrays daily life in an age that most readers know only from high school history books. The author not only takes readers into the homes of society matrons but through the tenements where their servants live and into the underground tunnel that connected the Mile High City’s brothels with Chinatown.

Emerson’s latest Diana Spaulding novel leaves readers anxiously awaiting her marriage to Dr. Nothcote and their adventures together at home in Bangor.

The next novel in the series, “No Mortal Reason,” is scheduled to be released next spring, just in time to shake off winter.

For more information, visit ww.kathylynnemerson.com. Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 and jharrison@bangordailynews.net.