I’ve felt led this year to devote a little attention to helping promote some authors and their works that I feel are worth readers’ time and money. I shared last week about my favorite novel, and this week I’m passing along a series that I think a lot of you will enjoy — if you like a good mystery that is.

 

NO GAME FOR A DAME (BY M. Ruth Myers) is the first book in the “Maggie Sullivan Mystery Series.” And one of the best things about this story is that it doesn’t have to end with the words “The End,” because there are several more where it came from.

 

The heroin, Maggie Sullivan, is a tough but totally likeable young woman who has broken through the barriers of the early 20th century resistance to women in the public work sector. In fact, the story is set in the years just prior to and including America’s involvement in WWII — a time when women in America were catapulted from being considered out of place in almost any workplace to holding down jobs in virtually every sector of life.

 

But Maggie has been ahead of the game, because she already had her own detective agency before 1940, and she doesn’t shy away from any case that needs her innate ability to solve a mystery and get people out of trouble.

 

The storyline is captivating, and the historical aspects of the setting are realistic, but not overbearing. Readers get a good handle on customs and attitudes without having to wade through a lot of excessive and unnecessary descriptions.

 

On top of that, the book is well-written. In an age when many independently published writers allow their work to go out to the public lacking any journalistic polish — or even the best grammar — Myers’ books have passed my “English teacher’s” test just fine.

 

Are there one or two things that I don’t particularly like about the books? Yes, but they are things that reflect my own very personal feelings and attitudes, and they don’t detract from the positive aspects of these stories. I’ve read 4 of the books in the series, and I’d have to say that if I were rating them with the 5-star test, I’d have to give them all 5 stars.