‘The Harvey Girl’ by Dana Stabenow

Published by Head of Zeus,
5 March 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-03591666-5

It's not often a book sends me down internet rabbit holes in search of the real-life history the story is based on – but then it's only marginally less often that a book is so rich in history that it makes me want to explore the background even further. The Harvey Girl did both – and sometimes it was hard to tell the fact from the fiction, it all fitted together so neatly. 

The Pinkerton detective agency played a well-documented part of crime fighting in 19^th and 20^th century America, and they were among the first employers of women detectives; so the central character Clare Wright is no surprise. Rather less prominent in the history books are the Harvey Girls, young, unmarried women engaged by businessman Fred Harvey to staff his restaurants and hotels along the routes of the burgeoning rail network in the late 19th century. A few Harvey Houses still exist; in the 1890s they appeared in every town, and often the towns grew up around them.    

When a train guard is murdered in the course of a series of robberies of supplies for the Harvey Houses along the line to Santa Fe, Fred Harvey engages the Pinkertons to find the culprit, and Clare Wright goes undercover as a Harvey Girl in one of his restaurants in New Mexico. It's Wild West country, complete with cowboys, drunken sheriff, cat-house and dance hall, straight out of a 1960s Hollywood movie, and portrayed in cinematic detail. Well-known real-life characters from the era add colour to the picture, though maybe the parts they play aren't strictly out of the history books. Mark Twain makes a guest appearance and has a hand in solving at least one mystery. Whether Bat Masterson was ever a Pinkerton's agent is open to speculation, and it's doubtful whether Butch Cassidy was related to the policeman whose negligence resulted in Abraham Lincoln's assassination. 

The story is populated with colourful characters, from the variety of farm girls and naïve and ambitious young women among the other Harvey Girls, to sleazy Walter Dabney the local Indian agent, motherly Mabel the murder victim's widow, and Louis Abernathy the Harvey House manager, who is hands-on in more ways than one. Not forgetting, of course, George Washington 'Wash' Gowan, charming but shady local entrepreneur who has made his fortune and wants the world to know it. 

It all adds up to a pacy mystery with a high-octane ending. Clare Wright is a feisty heroine, observant and sharp-minded, and well able to solve more than the murder. Perhaps the Wild West would have been tamed sooner with more Clares to subdue its excesses. I look forward to meeting her again.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick 

Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage in 1952 and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace (but has since been resurrected as an e-book), her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar award, her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list. The Land Beyond, the final third of her historical trilogy about Marco Polo's granddaughter, Silk and Song, was published in October 2015. There are 24 books in the Kate Shugak series. 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.