Search - Murder In Chinatown (Gaslight, Bk 9)

The next addition in the wonderful series featuring Sarah Brandt, nurse-midwife and Detective Francis Malloy during the turn of the century , centers around the bigotry toward the Chinese in New York City. Angel Lee, a half Chinese and half Irish teenager is promised in marriage to a rich forty year old Chinese man who is a friend of her father. She refuses to marry him and elopes with the man she loves, a handsome Irishman, whose family does not approve of the union any more than hers does. Her family tries to lure her home, but she refuses.....Instead she is found dead in an alley...strangled. In this book we learn much of the Chinese culture and mores....Excellent.... Love this series

Birth, death and everything in between - midwife Sarah Brandt has seen it all. In the tenaments of New York, Sarah helps out where she can. Now in the latest of the Edgar Award nominated novels, she ventures to an exotic land, less than a mile away...

In Chinatown to deliver a baby, Sarah meets a group of women she might otherwise never have come across: Irish girls, who, after alighting on Ellis Island alone, have married Chinese men in the same predicament. But faced with bigotry in New York from every side, their mixed-race children are often treated badly, by the Irish, the Chinese - even the police...

When the new mother's half-Chinese and half-Irish fifteen year old niece goes missing,
Sarah knows that alerting the constables would prove futile. So she turns to Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy - and together they begin to search for her themselves. And after they find the girl, dead in an alley, Sarah and Malloy have ample suspects from both sides of Canal Street.

This is a good read - great historical references and setting, great characters and the author's plot line is well thought out.