Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Historical Fiction
Content: a mild sex scene


For the first female Pinkerton detective, respect is hard to come by. Danger, however, is not.

In the tumultuous years of the Civil War, the streets of Chicago offer a woman mostly danger and ruin-unless that woman is Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton detective and a desperate widow with a knack for manipulation.

When I picked up Girl in Disguise I was expecting a mystery novel, but this turned out to be more solidly in the historical fiction category. I also wasn't aware that it was about a real person. Kate Warne really was the first female Pinkerton detective and very little is actually really known about her, besides a few of the cases she was instrumental in solving. She also played a part in seeing President Elect Abraham Lincoln safely to Washington D.C. for his inauguration when there were threats on his life, and acted as a spy during the war.

The cases that were included in the book were all interesting, but since there isn't a whole lot known about Kate Warne's personal life there was a lot of creative license taken by the author with her story. Of course that was necessary to create a book and this is fiction, but I'll be honest and say that I'm not always crazy about reading made up things about real people, even if we do know very little about them. I wasn't completely on board with the way Kate was portrayed in this book, but there were things I did like about her. Despite that, this book was very readable and at times difficult to put down.

If anything, reading this book made me want to know the real stories behind the Pinkerton agents mentioned in this book. I had to look them up and find out which ones were actually based on real people and how the book diverged from the real stories .

View all my reviews