Rhys Bowen — readers who love the Molly Murphy series for its fierce women navigating early 20th-century America will find a kindred spirit in Lucie Santoro.
Anna Lee Huber — if you’re drawn to historically grounded mysteries where the protagonist’s reputation is always at stake and the social constraints of the era are part of the tension, Lady Darby and Lucie occupy similar territory.
Margaret Coel — for readers who come to historical mystery for the deep research into communities and cultures often left out of mainstream history, Coel’s meticulous approach to Arapaho culture echoes Decter’s treatment of Virginia City’s Chinese community in Soiled Dove Murder.
The Chinese community in Soiled Dove Murder is grounded in documented history. While Sherilyn Decter has taken some narrative liberties with timeline — most of Virginia City’s Chinese residents had left by the 1920s — the details of their lives in that town are drawn from historical record: the laundry wars, the tong organizations, the foreign miner’s tax, the mortuary practices that caused such conflict with white residents, and the systematic discrimination that constrained every aspect of their daily existence.
Chinese immigrants first arrived in Montana following the gold rush, working claims that Euro-American miners had abandoned. They built self-sustaining communities, ran businesses and laundries, and maintained cultural practices — including arrangements to have bones returned to China after death — that set them apart and made them targets.
The tong battle at the heart of this novel draws from real documented conflicts over land leases in Alder Gulch. The marginalization of these women — doubly invisible as both Chinese and prostitutes — is not invention. It is what the historical record shows.
This is the kind of history Sherilyn Decter writes toward: the lives that official accounts overlooked, rendered from the inside out.
Soiled Dove Murder is the third book in the Moonshiner Mysteries. Start with Big Sky Murder or explore the full series.
Meet Lucie Before Montana Curious about who Lucie Santoro was before she became a schoolteacher in a small mining town? The Promise Trilogy tells her story — New York City, 1919, and a young Italian immigrant woman on the edge of becoming herself.
and before you go… Curious about Lash — the mysterious stranger who seems to know more than he should? His full story is told in Lash, a free novella for newsletter subscribers.
