Simone lives up in the mountains with her father. In the prologue, we find out that her father beats her mother and Simone on a regular basis. Her mother has had enough and plans to run away and try to get help. Simone is left behind because she is recovering from measles and is too weak to travel. Her mother never returns. When Simone gets old enough, her father is tired of his ever decreased trap business and has decided to sell the whole thing, including Simone, to some random stranger so he can go make his fortune mining gold in Colorado.
Simone decides that she is not going to stand for a grimy man taking her as his "wife" and fights back when he comes after her. Hitting him over the head with a pitcher, she believes that she has killed him and flees. She doesn't know that most people are not beat by their fathers and that there are men out there that are not lechers. She is able to make her way to Chicago where she interviews for a job as a Harvey girl. Fred Harvey had a chain of restaurants on the Santa Fe line that gave train passengers an elegant meal during their brief train stops.
Jeffrey interviews Simone and knows that there is something more to her than meets the eye. His mother would like nothing better than for him to marry well and take his place in society, but he wants none of that life. He pursues her and eventually finds out that she has a lot more secrets than he even suspects.
Simone is going to have to make peace with her past instead of running from it. She's also going to have to make peace with God. Her father is after her, he now has a new plan to make money, and this one involves Simone doing all the work for him. She's also got a lawman after her who is trying to prove to his father that he can finish something and finally make him proud. His investigations will be frustrating and force him to accept that everything may not be as it seems.
I have to admit that I almost didn't finish this book. About 20% in, we were still spending a lot of time on Simone's back story, and it was a really depressing back story. I went back to the summary on amazon and made sure that I was reading the book that I thought I was. When I realized it was, I kept reading and soon we were in Chicago.
As usual, it was an excellent book by a great author and I was glad to read it. Simone's story is satisfactorily complete, so if I wanted to, I could quit now and not feel like the story was unfinished. If she reappears in the next books, that's okay as well. I'm currently reading the next book in the series, Hidden in a Whisper, which follows Rachel, a character from this book. I look forward to her story. Good Book!
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