The Kopp sisters, Constance, Norma and Fleurette, are by turns amusingly and irritatingly eccentric. Living on an isolated country farm, the sisters, headstrong, fiery, and determined to live by their own lights, lead humdrum lives of farming and housework until one fateful day when their buggy is plowed into by a wayward scion of a wealthy family named Kaufman and his newfangled automobile. When the silk magnate refuses to pay for the damage, Constance launches a campaign to get him to take her seriously. In response the Kopp sisters are subjected to a campaign of harassment by Kaufman and his unsavory associates. Bricks are thrown through their windows, gunshots fired at their house, and poison pen letters arrive in the mail.
Along the way Constance meets another woman mistreated by Kaufman, an unwed mother whose child has gone missing and who mistrusts the police. Constance teams up a crusading local sheriff to take down Kaufman and reunite mother and child.
This novel is the first of a planned series, and frankly suffers too much from trying to set up its successors. The plot meanders toward its inevitable conclusion as once-intriguing mysteries are neatly solved with too-pat answers and things you’d like to think the characters would have thought of a lot sooner. The Kopp sisters, especially Constance are memorable characters (based on a real family, in fact) and Stewart’s first-person narration is admirably consistent and lively, but at over 400 pages, this book is too long for what it is, which is little more than a prologue.