Jane Smiley’s latest? A Gold Rush-era California sex worker mystery

Review A Dangerous Business By Jane Smiley Knopf: 224 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. This is the setup of Jane Smiley’s “A Dangerous Business.” Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Thousand Acres” and many other novels, lives in Monterey County, and her new book is an homage to her home’s frontier past, when Monterey was a motley mix of banks, bars and brothels, a magnet for sailors, grifters and fortune hunters, ringed by rolling hills and trackless backcountry. Fast friends, “the only thing they disagreed on was the work of Mr. Poe, work Jean loved and Eliza didn’t like at all, as it was too strange and gave her the jitters. After a dear friend is murdered, Eliza thinks of Poe’s detective and searches the author’s words for guidance and strength: “What struck her the most about Dupin was that he could look at all sorts of injury and destruction and still keep thinking in what you might call a cold and logical way.” She learns to use her head, and to master fear: “It was as if, for her whole life, she had been dumb and patient, like a milk cow. The title comes from Mrs. “Everyone knows that this is a dangerous business,” she tells Eliza, “but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Opinion Op-Ed: Jane Smiley: The deaths at Santa Anita remind me why I don’t miss horse racing I first heard about the unusually high number of horses dying at Santa Anita Park — which led to the temporary closure of the racetrack last week — from a friend at the barn where I keep my horses.