 the women who were among the first to be promoted to the rank of investigators in the state police of New York. And her brother teasingly calls her the nation's first. She, like many of the women in this book, is up against certain expectations about the way she should look and act. But also by virtue of the fact that she's a woman, she's able to access certain information that some of her male colleagues are not able to access. And certain characters in the book trust her in a way that they don't trust the men.