Kerry Greenwood - Murder on the Ballarat Train

This, the third book about the Honourable Phryne Fisher (and the last of the three books in my omnibus volume). She and Dot takes a train ride to Ballarat. However, they never reaches their destination. Chloroform are leaking into the wagon making everyone drowsy and an older, wealthy woman is kidnapped and later found dead. Then a teenage girl turns up. She has lost her memory, but Phryne takes her in, calls her Jane and tries to find out what has happened to her. There are some differences to the TV episodes, but I do not want to dwell on those topics here. I save them for a later entry.
The three first of the the Phryne Fisher books worked great, combined into one volume. There are some over-arching themes in them that makes them fit together. There are some overlapping themes in two or all of the books. For example, the pedophilia theme that was introduced in Flying too High is sort of eplored further in the third book. To be fair I have no idea what age it is legal to have sex in Australia either today or during the 1920's, but some of the girls involved seem to be barely teenagers and therefore probably considered too young. That subplot actually also bring me to the second of the recurrent themes from the first three of the books about Phryne Fisher: all three of them somewhat involve women in different types of destructive sexual relationships and how they are affected by them.

In Cocaine Blues there is Lydia Andrews who's sexuality is really destroyed by her husband (probably) forcing himself on her. Amelia McNaughton in Flying too High is molested by her own father (who also seem to have raped her mother from time to time) and her fiancé Paolo says he has sort of drawn her sexuality out of her again. In the same book, there is also an indication to Phryne herself having had bad experiences with sexual relationship and if the books are anything like the TV series, this will be furthered discussed in later ones. In Murder on the Ballarat Train, this theme is very prominent in the subplot with Jane and later on also Gabrielle Hart who has been lured and hypnotized into prostitution (by Henry Burton and Miss Gay?).

All of these female characters react to it somewhat differently. Paolo's comment about how careful and tender he had to be with Amelia, indicates that she too was scared at first. Being treated tenderly by Paolo probably encouraged her to explore her sexuality. Likewise Gabrielle Hart and Jane are sort of hypnotized during the whole thing, but still, they are scared as they wake up from the trance. However, Jane finds Phryne. Dot and the Butlers and Gabrielle Hart has (at least) her father who are there for them. Lydia Andrews is in this sense probably worse off. She seems to have no one there to catch her as she falls. Her parents are on the other side of the world and even though they are apparently worried, they are not there for her in the same sense and she does not seem to confide in them in the same way. It is pretty sad actually when you think about it and might be her motivator for turning "bad".

The first picture are my own, but the other book covers borrowed from here and here.