"One O'Clock Jump" is like a time capsule, transporting a tale of murder, greed, and intrigue from vintage Kansas City into the present day. Dorie Lennox is a humdinger of a private eye. Let's hope she's here to stay."
-- Sue Grafton, bestselling author of "O is for Outlaw"

The mystery features private eye Dorie Lennox, a child of the Depression making her own way through the jazz clubs and cobblestones of the city. Beginning on Labor Day, 1939, as the world goes to war again, "One O'Clock Jump" takes an unsentimental journey back to the days of swing music, dance marathons, and hard times. With its vivid, sure prose and sharp dialogue, "One O'Clock Jump" evokes the atmosphere of the World War II era in perfect newsreel clarity, while delivering a thoughtful, forceful mystery that will linger with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Halfway around the world, war has begun. But for Dorie Lennox, newly-minted p.i. on her first tail, danger is more immediate. The dark streets of Kansas City offer swing music, fast cars, gangsters -- and the chance to forget about her own murky past. but first Dorie must conquer her fears and save a woman on a bridge high above the muddy Missouri River. When the woman takes a dive, Dorie is thrown into a quickly unraveling scam that offers salvation to few -- and misery to plenty -- in the high stakes world of machine politics and desperation deals. 

Lennox's path to Kansas City is full of detours -- a brush with the law, a lost family, an aborted university and track career. But she's found a home of sorts in the Italian boardinghouse full of souls as lost and quirky as her own. Her switchblade goes everywhere with her, as a rabbit's foot for luck -- and sometimes much more. Her boss, Amos Haddam, was a British soldier during World War I. Lost behind the lines he was gassed and has the scarred lungs to prove it. When he lands in the hospital, Lennox must carry the ball, clearing Haddam's name and finding who is playing her for a sucker.

With vivid, sure prose and sharp dialogue, the world of Dorie Lennox comes alive, behind the wheel of her Packard, in the packinghouse, race tracks, and mansions of Kansas City. The landscape of America, the homefront of World War II, is evoked in detailed, lively writing. Lise McClendon's "One O'clock Jump" offers the force of characters and keen sharpness of a slice of history through the perceptive, compassionate eyes of Dorie Lennox.

Read Chapter One of One O'Clock Jump