Tears of the Dragon launches a new cozy series set in Chicago where the Browne family, mother and four daughters, hold things together in the face of the Depression. Their essential niceness makes a nice contrast to the gangsters and grit so often associated with this time and place.

Elodie Browne, the family bread-winner, thinks herself lucky to have a job, so she ignores sinister noises down the hall as her elevator opens on the wrong floor of her office building one night.

Then for a lark--and extra cash--she takes a job serving at a party given by Lee Chang, an importer of antiques and jade. The evening is disturbed by a dying man who stumbles in raving about "Ming Dao." What's that? Elodie's curiosity is up...a mistake.

Reviews

When you think about crime in Chicago in the 1930s, it's bootleggers and gangsters who come to mind, not tong wars and Chinese politics. One of the delights of "Tears of the Dragon," Holly Baxter's first book in a proposed series of mysteries about a Chicago family struggling to survive the Depression, is the way she plants a rare and colorful Asian flower in

the overused ground of the period. Elodie Browne, a promising writer, supports her widowed mother and three sisters with a low-paying job in an office in a huge new building largely emptied by the financial upheavals of the day. Her friend Bernice, a flighty but generous young woman, earns a bit more working for a Chinese importer of antiques and jade. Browne goes through several genre staples, like finding a body and witnessing a murder. But what really earns the early raves the book has received is the way Baxter (a pseudonym for Paula Gosling, an American

writer who lives in England and has won several awards there) blends her ingredients--Chinese spices and familiar Midwestern fare--into a tasty and

original dish. -- Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune, June 26, 2005