These books were numbers two and three in her new series and the brand new fourth. The four books to date are The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, Fire and Fog, The Bohemian Murders, and the latest Emporor Norton's Ghost.
Fremont Jones is the protagonist. She is a plucky woman in her early twenties who has heard the call go west young woman, and leaves her Boston society home to live in San Francisco. She goes against the wishes of her father, whom she loves very much, but her mother's people were founding fathers in California and Fremont has a small inheritance from her mother and does not have fond regards or feelings toward her stepmother and so she sets out to begin her own business in San Francisco as a typist.
Fremont takes up residence in a three-storey boarding house with landlady Maureen O'Leary, who lives on the first floor. Handsome gentleman, Michael Archer, who has a touch of gray in his beard and is often unexplainably absent, rents the second floor and Fremont resides on the third.
The office of Fremont's typewriting service is on the second floor of a building owned by a husband and wife named Sorenson who operate a book shop on the first floor.
Fremont (originally christened Caroline Fremont Jones, Fremont being her mother's maiden name) awakens just after five am one morning to find the floor moving below her and windows breaking and pieces of furniture falling precariously. It is the great earthquake of San Francisco in 1906.
Once determined that everyone in the boarding house is uninjured, Fremont ventures to her office to check on her most prized possession and the source of her continued income, her typewriter.
When she determines that it has not been damaged by the quake, she begins to explore the rest of the second floor of the building. She finds a room, once empty filled with crates of books and a room once unlocked, locked. Curiosity overcomes her and she uses a hairpin to pick the lock. She finds crates artificially fashioned to look like crates of books, but empty in the center and holding what could only be expensive stolen goods.
