The Minuscule Monk A Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective Mystery By Richard Behrens

Multi-genre, multi-volume author, Richard Behrens introduces us to his first book in the Lizzie Borden Girl Detective Mystery series, “The Minuscule Monk”:
When a dead body mysteriously appears in the basement of her father’s furniture store, 15 year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden immediately takes on the case. Accompanied by an eccentric millionaire who campaigns to extend the vote to animals; a Boston terrier trained to sniff out crooked politicians; and a boy detective who believes the entire universe to be inside his own head, Lizzie follows a trail of taxidermy tools and Civil War bushwhackers to the Minuscule Monk, a legendary gunslinger whose mummified body will bring a punter’s pot to anyone who can deliver it to the New York gangster who has been hunting the Monk for decades. With such high stakes, everyone has a motive for murder, yet everyone seems innocent. Or perhaps, as Lizzie suspects after attending a dinner party with non-existent food and meeting a horse that has turned into its opposite, none of it is even real. Lizzie Borden, the Girl Detective of Fall River, is at her most spirited in The Minuscule Monk, a comic mystery that paints a portrait of Fall River at the height of its splendor and its most infamous citizen at the start of her most excellent career. 

I really enjoyed reading about Lizzie Borden, she is a refreshing character in a genre that is heavily populated with men. All most of us know about the historical figure is that she killed her mother and father. This alt-history book is nothing like that and is very fun to read, the author does many things well. There are many conversations and suitable action scenes move the story along nicely.
Richard has built a very believable world that The Girl Detective inhabits and sleuths in. His writing is very rich, a literary treat not just for fans of mystery but fans of historical fiction. The weaving of fact with fiction is quite seamless and leads the reader down a most merry path. He has captured the tone of the times almost too well, occasionally the writing borders on corpulent, descriptions so heavy that only a wordsmith can truly appreciate. I give this very satisfying story 4.6 of 5 Stars.

You can buy this book:
http://www.amazon.com/the Miniscule Monk
https://www.goodreads.com/-the-minuscule-monk
 
You can follow the author:
https://www.facebook.com/richard.behrens.31
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/557802.Richard_Behrens
https://www.facebook.com/LizzieBordenGirlDetective/
http://lizziebordengirldetective.com/
 
Copyright © 2016 Mark L. Schultz except for the author’s introduction