Showing January Jinx (The Calendar Mysteries Book 1) by Juliet Kincaid

January Jinx, Book One of the Calendar Mysteries

From January through December, the Calendar Mysteries tell the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond.

The first chance Minty Wilcox gets in January 1899, she sets off to find a stenographer’s job in Kansas City. But her search is jinxed from the start.

First, a soldier named Hanks falls backward down the steep Ninth Street Incline, site of the cable car line. Next, Clayton Cole, an old man with a gun and a badge, accuses Minty of murdering the soldier. Then Cole chases Minty away before she can find out if Hanks is alive, dying or dead.

On Minty’s way home, a young, bearded stranger approaches her. Though he turns out to be her mother’s prospective boarder, Daniel Price stays a mystery in other ways. For instance, what was he really doing next door inside the house of the nosy Miss Agnes Shackleton?

Minty barely has time to tell her mother about her jinxed morning when Miss Shackleton shows up and repeats malicious gossip about the Wilcox family. She even threatens to run the Wilcoxes out of the Quality Hill neighborhood.

Before Mama can get rid of Miss Shackleton, who should show up but Clayton Cole, demanding the steep sum of one hundred dollars to forget what he claims he saw Minty murder Soldier Hanks.

So there’s nothing for Minty to do but set aside her search for employment and go looking for Soldier Hanks. At Mama’s insistence, Daniel Price escorts her. Talk about nosy! Why else does Price keep showing up wherever Minty goes? Why else would he sneak into her room and look at her diary? (Thank goodness, she writes her installments in shorthand.)

In spite of her efforts to clear her name, eventually bad luck spreads like a nasty cold from Minty to her entire family and to Mr. Daniel Price as well. Minty feels that she brought all these troubles to her family and friends, so she must set things right.

This won’t be easy in Kansas City where, a hundred years ago, living could get downright deadly.