She Went to Paris

It's Paris, it's spring, the chestnuts on the boulevards are blooming, and when Sterling Kirkland Sawyer, a young writer from New York, arrives in 1921, she's immediately immersed in the frenetic life at literary salons, at the studios of surrealist painters, celebrated sculptors, poets and novelists, at concerts and art exhibitions, at late nights doing the Charleston and the Bunny Hop, and at dinners with lovers and friends at the famous watering-holes of the day. Some eighty years later, Private Investigator, Jamie Prescott, is hired by Sterling's niece, now in her seventies, to find out why and how Sterling disappeared so suddenly in the early 1930s. The clues are obscure as if her whereabouts had been deliberately suppressed at the time, and no one who knew her in Paris has ever come forward. Jamie Prescott is 42, single, six feet and then some, has a master's in criminal justice, occasionally carries a gun, has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and works out of offices on K Street in Washington, D.C. Jamie heads to Paris to follow in Sterling's footsteps and is helped and hindered in her investigation by an ex-husband, a colorful assistant from Manhattan, a stripper from Montmartre, an ancient nun, a would-be poet, and a chatelaine from French wine country. Jamie winds up her quest in New York and Washington in circumstances which surprise even herself.