Girl Waits with Gun

This is a really charming book about a little known criminal case in Bergen country, NJ just after the turn of the 20th century. It was recommended on a podcast, though I've now forgotten which. The main character, Constance Kopp, was a real person and the retelling of the case is largely factual. This has the same, civilian turn deputy feel as The Alienist, and I'd recommend it if you enjoyed that. It's got a bit of cheeky humor too. 3.5 stars.

Slow to develop? No, just the pace of the book.

I didn't even know that I was craving this book until I started reading it.

Bonus points for the epilogue explaining the historical aspects in the book, and listing the original publication info for all the headlines and news items.

No gore, no death, very refreshing for a ‘mystery'. And it has 3 sisters with interesting personalities that live on their own terms, not those of the society of the age.

Putting the next in the series on my TBR list.

Girl Waits With Gun is an enjoyable detective story based on a real family's life in New Jersey in the early 20th century. Most of the detective work in this novel is done by Constance Kopp, who is not actually a detective, just a woman with a past trying to resolve a traffic accident that destroyed her family's buggy. Her efforts draw the ire of the perpetrator and also bring her into contact with other vulnerable people he has harmed. Miss Kopp's sisters pull her in opposite directions: the older sister, Norma, thinks she should let the accident go in order to stay out of the way of the criminals, and the younger sister, Fleurette, wants to dive in and get much more involved in spite of the fact that she is being targeted for kidnapping. Meanwhile, her brother Francis is pressuring Constance and her sisters to move off the farm where they're living and crowd into his house in town where he can keep an eye on them.

One of the things that is so enjoyable about this story is that it acknowledges the issues that women of the time had: vulnerability to men who see women living independently as targets for exploitation, lack of employment opportunities, lack of means (and societal acceptance) for raising children on their own. All of this is present in the story and goes into creating the situation that gives rise to the story. Yet the Kopp sisters are individuals who handle their problems according to their own lights and in the process read like a real, annoying family.

I was sceptical of the amount of help Miss Kopp received from the Sheriff and his deputies, but there is a plausible (unstated) reason for it in the story besides the Sheriff's zeal for the law. Overall, I really liked this book.

I wanted to like the book, but there was some unchallenged anti-semitism that left a bad taste.

This book is a great work of historical fiction. The characters are what move the story along, and I enjoyed the somewhat mundane details of the sisters' lives on a farm in New Jersey in 1914. I think when this book first came out, we didn't know it'd be part of a series. But I'm glad that there is a second book! I can't wait to pick it up. While the book is classified a mystery, that is a rather small element of this story. This is the story of Constance and her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, and how they're getting on when they're unlucky enough to run in to a rather pathetic gangster. I did thoroughly enjoy this book, and I read it quickly, but sometimes it felt a bit too slow. Some bits could have been left out to make the plot move along a bit faster. The one other con I have against this book is that Constance, our protagonist, is almost the weakest character. I have a good sense of who Norma and Fleurette are - what interests them and what their personalities are like - but with Constance, she sometimes seems like a doormat and at other times she jumps up and manhandles people. Maybe Constance is uncertain of herself, her life, and her own wants, but I still think that, by the time she's in her mid-thirties, she'd have more personality traits.

Started off really slow, but got better towards the end. The girl, Fleurette, seemed like she should be much younger than almost 18. That kept pulling me out of the book.

This was an enjoyable read. I didn't love it, but the reading experience was fun and it was a well-paced piece of historical fiction.

My main problems with it are two-fold.

1) The very first line of the Goodreads page for this book is: “A novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation's first female deputy sheriffs.” Well, Constance Kopp may have been the nation's first female deputy sheriff, but this book is not about her being a sheriff. In fact, POTENTIAL SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY no one mentions that she should become a deputy sheriff until literally the last line of the book, and only after she's proven countless times that she is capable of standing up for herself and her family when a powerful factory owner destroys their property and then tries to threaten and intimidate them to get them to stay quiet about it. Constance Kopp is pretty badass, I just wish they had teased the book better because this was a point of frustration for me. (I kept wondering when she was going to get offered a job, for like the entire book.)

2) My goodness, I get that it's 1914 but the constant references to how the Kopp sisters couldn't POSSIBLY do things on their own because SPINSTERS and WHERE IS YOUR FATHER AND/OR YOUR HUSBANDS, and WHY DON'T YOU JUST MOVE IN WITH YOUR BROTHER'S FAMILY SO YOU CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF, and then they do badass stuff and prove they don't need no stinkin' men, and then everyone is all surprised that women are CAPABLE and HAVEN'T FAINTED in the face of terror. Rawr.

But, those issues aside, it was straight-forward and easy to read, the story didn't lag, and the characters were interesting.

More like 3.75 stars, I liked it but did not LOVE it.
I'm writing this review to my future self because I know at some point I am going to pick up the second book in this series(?) and ask “should I read this?”
Here is what you liked: the setting. Paterson is where Shannon's wedding was so you were just in that area and had a mental picture of what the streets look like and could imagine them in 1914, no problem. You love the time period. You didn't love that these three women seemed adrift and lost in life. Having hobbies is not the same as actually living a life, and when the time comes for the bills to be paid that question comes to the forefront quickly.
The snarky writing was pretty awesome, until it became twee and got on your nerves. Fleurette was 17 years old and had the behavior of a 2 year old. There was an actual temper tantrum.
Norma and Constance have a Grey Gardens vibe to them that may or may not be a good thing.
I appreciated the fact that the mother figure was deceased, remembered with respect, and not missed. That was refreshing!
I had really wanted to listen to this in audio and I still think it would have made a wonderful listen.
So, future self, here is the deal. Continue on if you can find an audio of Lady Cop Makes Trouble, otherwise...meh.

A neat little thriller/detective story, a genre i do not usually read. I mostly enjoyed the cultural and societal history aspect of this book of the three sisters bumping into a new york/new jersey gang of organized crime. The home page of this book series has pictures of that time and the main characters. It brings it all closer for a history junkey like me.

Meh... This was okay. I wanted more than I got from this story. The characters were relatively interesting but, overall, it was lackluster.

As this is the first installment of a forthcoming series, it was heavy on character and world building. There is nothing wrong with that, but even book #1 in a series should stand alone. Subjected to this standard, Girl Waits With Gun was marginal, at best.

I believe this yarn would strike a chord with a niche audience. Just because I do not for the bill, does not make this a poor story. Also, I would not define it as poorly written.

I'll be hinest, the cover got me. Well done on that account.

Very disappointing read after a glowing review on NPR. The story was very repetitive, the writing was pedestrian, and for a piece of historical fiction I don't feel like I learned much about American life in 1914.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
—

He looked up and said, in a loud, plain voice, “She's not a regular lady.”

I received this book for free in exchange for a review from Mysteries & Crime Thrillers

Rating : 3,5 *

Being a woman has never been easy, but being a woman, living alone with one's sisters, on an isolated farm in 1915, becomes even more complicated for Constance Kopp.

After a young, rich and belligerent silk factory owner hit their buggy with his motor car, the Kopp sisters bill him for damages. What should have been a simple manner of reimbursing them 50$ for the reparation turns into a year of kidnapping threats, flying bullets and cops camping in the sisters' barn. To convict the culprit and his accomplices, the sheriff recruits Constance in the investigation. Along the way, a chance encounter forces Constance to confront a family secret and face their uncertain financial future.

Based on true events, this novel introduces us to Constance Kopp, US's first female deputy sheriff. She is depicted as a strong and stubborn woman who is determined to get reparation from the gang who recklessly damaged their buggy. After all, why should she accept another resolution than a man would! Her interactions with other characters illustrate clearly society's expectations about “simple woman” and how she should act. The well-meaning, but oh so patronizing, “isn't there a brother or an uncle who can take care of you?” question, asked more than once in the novel, is evidence of the place women occupied in society.

Even if a little stereotypical, Constance, Norma and Fleurette Kopp take life in this novel. Norma, dependable and more conservative has a passion for pigeons, and Fleurette, childish and a little spoiled likes to design and sew new clothes. After some time, I felt like I could predict how they would react to new situations. Other secondary characters, such as the sheriff, are also well-fleshed and coherent. In fact, the less detailed characters are the villains of the book. Obviously, the author did not want to spend much time with them, or the documents she used did not offer more information about them. The gang felt like an ominous and ill-defined presence throughout the book, which was a really effective way to transmit the oppressive feeling felt by the sisters to the reader.

I came to this book without knowing it was based on true events (in fact I discovered this information in the postface of the book). So, I was expecting a fast-paced story, with a gun-bearing too-modern heroin. What I discovered instead was a slow-paced book based more on the ambiance and social dynamics of the era than the action of the story. It was for me a good and a bad surprise: good because I took away a lot more from this book than I would have from a “simple” mystery, but also bad because some sections seemed to lag a little.

All in all, I thought it was a good portrait of an era and of an exceptional woman and the circumstances that helped her show the world who she was and that she would not sit back and take the beating in silence. Constance Kopp is a model that should be known and followed by many young, and less young, ladies nowadays.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. This is definitely a character-driven mystery, not one with an elaborate or twisty plot, and though there are lots of threats there's little on-stage violence. The pleasure is in getting to know tart-tongued Norma, flamboyant Fleurette, and especially Constance, whose search for a place and a purpose in life is tantalizingly given a direction at the very end. I've no doubt that readers will be begging for a sequel, and Stewart seems inclined to oblige us. I'll be eagerly waiting for another installment in the story of the Kopp sisters.