This is book 1 of the "Phryne Fisher" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Gets the series off to a good start.

Phryne is at dinner with her parents (not at all usual) when the lights go off and a window smashes. And the hostess' super-special diamond necklace is gone. Oops!

Phryne goes outside where it's quiet, notices the glass was mostly broken outward, stubs her toe on a cricket ball, and connects this with the amateur cricketer she was talking with at dinner. And her father takes her seriously without a screaming scene even (just barely).

This gets her invited to the Colonel's country place to discuss helping him with something the next day. His daughter may be going astray, or missing, in Australia, and Phryne is going back there soon anyway.

And the plot gets complex from there, once she gets back to Australia. The poor threatened daughter turns out to be the King of Cocaine. And there's a lot of other plot along the way.

On the ship back she meets Dr. Elizabeth MacMillan, who will become something of a regular. She meets Bert and Cec, also regulars, getting her luggage hauled off from the docks.

Then Bert and Cec get a woman injured by a hack abortionist dumped on them (though they don't know tha tinstantly). And we've got some touring Russian dancers, who she happens to have seen in Paris also, and their displaced aristocratic mother.

So, we've got the drug trade, hack abortionists, quite a lot of feminism, flotsam of revolutions, and some relationships forming awfully fast. I believe Dot's here somewhere too, though this damned DRMed thing's reader won't search.