The Last Hundred Yearsis an entertaining, light murder mystery set in Monterey, California, in 1851 during the Gold Rush. It follows, Smiley's charming, whimsical fable about various squabbling, talking animals living in the rough in Paris' Champs du Mars.
With few options for self-supporting employment, Eliza turned to sex work after her husband died in a bar brawl. She finds it preferable to the miserable marriage her Covenanter parents pushed her into to nip her budding romance with an Irish Catholic laborer back home in Kalamazoo. Smiley's likeable protagonists appreciate the relative independence and financial security of their work. Again, somewhat dubiously, they are not just tolerant of but sympathetic to their clients' loneliness and physical needs, which leads to a surprisingly benign view of working in a brothel.
As the bodies and clues pile up, Eliza becomes suspicious of all of her clients — the drunks, the lonely lechers, the sex-starved sailors, the talkative lawyer with a dagger in his jacket pocket,"the evangelical who wept and puked and passed out." She even starts to doubt the friendly young rancher who likes to take her out for breakfast, as if they were"a respectable couple."
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