Book excerpt: "It's not like it's murder.""Don't kid yourself, sister. People commit all kinds of crimes for all kinds of reasons. There's murder afoot whenever money is involved."Ambitious and idealistic, Mimi Smith leaves her home out west and pauses her college career to work for the war effort in Washington, D.C. She lands an entry-level stenographer's job at the government office that oversees rationing and black-market activities, and a rented room in Alexandria, Virginia. But Mimi's got bigger plans than laboring as a mere stenographer-she has an eye on a slot as an investigator. When she breaks up a group of drunken servicemen harassing a flashily dressed woman at a dance, her instincts kick in. She saves the young woman and tries to get her back on her feet. It's soon clear that the victim, Kitty Hawkins, is what Mimi's grandmother calls a "magdalen," a lady of the evening Kitty is trying to escape that life and outrun the desperate "quivers" she feels breathing down her neck. It's June 1943, halfway through a world war that feels like it will never end. Rationing, victory gardens, and making do or doing without have all become a patriotic way of life. But the flip side of patriotism is hoarding, profiteering, theft, and black marketeering. And someone in Alexandria is murdering magdalens caught up in selling information and stolen goods. Teaming up with a skeptical local policeman and a country boy soon to enter the Navy, Mimi grapples with life, death, and a killer who has set his sights on her. Firefly is the prequel to the bestselling Crime of Fashion Mysteries, featuring Lacey Smithsonian. Set decades before Lacey plies her trade as a journalist in D.C., Firefly explores Lacey's great aunt Mimi Smith's wartime journey that brought her to Washington, the parallels between the two women, including their love of fashion and the clues people wear without knowing it, and the origins of Mimi's trunk full of mysteries, the trunk Lacey later inherits. And both Mimi and Lacey discover they have a passion for finding out how the story ends.