Girl Waits With Gun

Girl Waits With Gun is an enjoyable detective story based on a real family's life in New Jersey in the early 20th century. Most of the detective work in this novel is done by Constance Kopp, who is not actually a detective, just a woman with a past trying to resolve a traffic accident that destroyed her family's buggy. Her efforts draw the ire of the perpetrator and also bring her into contact with other vulnerable people he has harmed. Miss Kopp's sisters pull her in opposite directions: the older sister, Norma, thinks she should let the accident go in order to stay out of the way of the criminals, and the younger sister, Fleurette, wants to dive in and get much more involved in spite of the fact that she is being targeted for kidnapping. Meanwhile, her brother Francis is pressuring Constance and her sisters to move off the farm where they're living and crowd into his house in town where he can keep an eye on them.

One of the things that is so enjoyable about this story is that it acknowledges the issues that women of the time had: vulnerability to men who see women living independently as targets for exploitation, lack of employment opportunities, lack of means (and societal acceptance) for raising children on their own. All of this is present in the story and goes into creating the situation that gives rise to the story. Yet the Kopp sisters are individuals who handle their problems according to their own lights and in the process read like a real, annoying family.

I was sceptical of the amount of help Miss Kopp received from the Sheriff and his deputies, but there is a plausible (unstated) reason for it in the story besides the Sheriff's zeal for the law. Overall, I really liked this book.