just finished reading

This might be the type of book that grows on me the more I think about it. It's historical fiction, based on a true unsolved mystery. I eyeball read it and listened to it. Because there is so much music in it, listening to the songs made them come alive; when I read the songs they were just words. And there is quite a bit of French in the book, it's almost bilingual! Usually I don't mind books that go back and forth in time, but in this instance, because the time frame is only a few days, I found myself confused about the sequence of events.

From the publisher:

Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.

The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.