In the third novel covering Constant Kopp’s exploits, we find ourselves now fully immersed in the storyline Stewart continues to extract from the first female sheriff’s deputy in the United States. Based on newspaper articles on the infamous stories written about the real ‘Officer Kopp’ Stewart had regaled us the fiction she weaves into the missing pieces of history, in an extraordinarily interesting fashion.
The three Kopp sisters live together in rural New Jersey in the 1920’. Fleurette, the youngest - and actually the daughter of Constance from a dalliance in her youth – and Norma make up the surviving clan. The matriarch Kopp having died a few years prior the girls were forced to look out for each other and Constance, a well-built and tall girl for her age, convinced Sheriff Heath to hire her to look after the female prisoners in the County jail.
Many of the young women in the jail are runaways or imprisoned on alleged morality charges, often trumped up my parents not wanting the young ladies to live at home because they were a little free-spirited. Constance, because of her history, feels emboldened to help some of these girls out and takes on the District Attorney who is determined to put these girls into a reformatory until they turn twenty-one.
While she is watching out for the girls in her care she fails to notice that her daughter/sister, Fleurette, who had recently turned eighteen, had absconded with a dance troupe to entertain audiences all over the East coast. Trying to keep up with her job and determine her family is safe and not in the hands of a flim-flam entertainer makes for an entertaining read and has Constance examining her own moral code. Stewart has another winner on her hands with Midnight Confessions.
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