Shamus Award winning author M. Ruth Myers brings her much-loved private investigator Maggie Sullivan and the detective's Ohio city into World War II in these three novels. Small historical details bring to life America's home front and create a noir atmosphere that winds around the mysteries at the heart of each.
In MAXIMUM MOXIE, Maggie is hired to find a missing man with valuable engineering information. As news of the attack on Pearl Harbor focuses the rest of the city on preparations for war, Maggie braves a crime boss in his den to find the answers she needs to save the missing man's life.
In DAMES FIGHT HARDER, murder at a construction site leads straight to the door of Maggie's friend Rachel Minsky, who has a secret life of which Maggie is unaware. Do wartime shortages and groups of children who roam the streets at night while their mothers work in defense plants hold clues which could prove Rachel's innocence?
In UNCIVIL DEFENSE, Maggie must learn who killed a newly released convict during a countywide blackout drill in order to save the dead man's innocent friends and relatives. With the draft draining men from an already short-staffed police force, she finds herself forging an uneasy alliance with an old nemesis.
Characters who took on lives of their own for readers in the first four books of this historical mystery series now change in ways that reflect the changing world around them. Maggie's male acquaintances are drafted or enlist. Jolene, the cigarette girl who, like Maggie, rooms at Mrs. Z's, trades her nightclub costume for the overalls of a job in the motor pool at a nearby Army air base. The waitress who for years has served Maggie her breakfast at McCrory's lunch counter leaves for better paying waitress work elsewhere.
Amid the changes, crime, deceit and human greed continue, and so does Maggie's tenacity in helping her clients.
