This picture book was lent to me by a librarian after I told her of a story idea I had about a woman detective in the 19th Century. A fairly innocuous little tome it covers the virtually unknown first woman to be a detective with the Pinkerton agency, a precursor to today's U.S. Secret Service. It does a nice job with subtle jabs at the male-dominated society of the time, letting the readers know that women had skill sets men didn't have in this arena and how they didn't get credit when they did succeed. Apparently Ms. Warne was instrumental in stopping an assassination attempt on then President-Elect Lincoln but history (as it often does) allowed her contributions to fade away. Like many nonfiction picture books the various plotlines are boiled down a good deal which can create difficulties in having a clean narrative and the inclusion of occasional vocabulary which is not likely to be in the readers' reach. The assumption is that a librarian (or parent) reading this to a child would put the story in context. The artwork is somewhat flat, making it difficult to distinguish one character from another, but has bright colors and mimics collage. An end note provides more details (although some, like her age, are in dispute) and leaves me intrigued to find out more about this woman. While not a remarkable work it is another important story of the forgotten contributions to our history of the silent majority.
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