This is a very strong debut of a new female protagonist, a woman struggling against the boundaries placed on women in her time (turn-of-the-century America). A step away from disaster at any moment, Fremont Jones sets off to redefine herself and to face life on her own terms. Fortunately for us, her own terms includes a strong dollop of adventure, romance, and gritty details of life for a woman alone in those times. This book is a rather quick read, but a very satisfying one. Its sequel, Fire and Fog, is even more satisfying as we see the character mature and settle in to the rhythms of life in San Francisco only for them to be thoroughly disrupted by the Great Quake. This is truly a writer to watch!

A very fun book, very enjoyable: a character you can sympathize with, some good local color, some nice plot turns. The author's background in romantic literature helps her make Fremont Jones more believable as a person. There's an even heavier dollop of gothic horror.

Highly recommended if you want a fun read, like San Francisco and-or enjoy period mysteries with spunky female detectives (I do).

The book does have flaws. It's well written but not a classic. Some of the plot turns seem a bit abruptly convenient and quite a bit of the action builds character but doesn't do much for the plot. But it's fun enough to push it above average and make it worth the read.

I adore this book. I just re read it last night and couldn't put it down (again). The book is set in the early 1900s in San Francisco. Our earstwhile heroine Fremont Jones has just moved to town to start a typewriting business. Stranger mysteries around the documents she is typing soon ensue. There are two mysteries ongoing throughout the book, and they're both neatly wrapped up. One plot line concerns the author of Gothic Horror short stories (like Poe) and you get the bonus of reading selections from them. Excellent quick read.

I'm not going to bore you with another rendition of the plot of this book. Four other reviewers have done an excellent job. I will say that a reader should start at the beginning of this series to get the full enjoyment of this story. Fremont Jones is a wonderfully fleshed out character. Ms. Day is a wonderful and entertaining writer. She does a great job of characterization and plotting in her books. The author is also great at giving her books a good feel for the times. Weather it be, social, physical or emotional. The reader gets the added plus of comparing East and West Coast in this installment. Ms. Day is right, there is a vast difference between the two. May be next time Fremont can go to Southern California, once again there is a vast difference. It would be interesting to see Fremont's take on that one. The mystery in this installment is a good solid one. Who did what or did it happen at all? Then the why, Ms. Day as always does an excellent job of closing the plot and explaining the why of this story. Once again, I wholeheartedly recommend this book and series. One note to the previous reviewer, read "The Strange Files of Fremont Jones" to find out about the Fremont relation. One does not have to have children to have people related to them.

I'm not going to bore you with another rendition of the plot of this book. Four other reviewers have done an excellent job. I will say that a reader should start at the beginning of this series to get the full enjoyment of this story. Fremont Jones is a wonderfully fleshed out character. Ms. Day is a wonderful and entertaining writer. She does a great job of characterization and plotting in her books. The author is also great at giving her books a good feel for the times. Weather it be, social, physical or emotional. The reader gets the added plus of comparing East and West Coast in this installment. Ms. Day is right, there is a vast difference between the two. May be next time Fremont can go to Southern California, once again there is a vast difference. It would be interesting to see Fremont's take on that one. The mystery in this installment is a good solid one. Who did what or did it happen at all? Then the why, Ms. Day as always does an excellent job of closing the plot and explaining the why of this story. Once again, I wholeheartedly recommend this book and series. One note to the previous reviewer, read "The Strange Files of Fremont Jones" to find out about the Fremont relation. One does not have to have children to have people related to them.

Fremont Jones knows her stepmother is poisoning her father. The only thing is, no one believes he is being poisoned. If he were, sweet Augusta is the last person anyone would suspect. The doctors poo-poo Fremont, her father's bank partner questions her sanity, and even Michael, Fremont's lover, seems to fall under Augusta's sway.

Dianne Day manages to convey 1908 Boston (the novel starts in San Francisco and moves to Boston) in both physical but especially the social and emotional senses. Fremont is unconventional (being a private detective), yet still bound by conventions. Day's style is a huge part of the book. Although there is certainly some complexity in the mystery, including whether there is a mystery at all, the chief joy in reading BEACON STREET MOURNING is in the reading itself.

John Charles Frémont is history's version of an unscrupulous, morally inverted Forrest Gump. In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Forrest was the affable idiot-savant who constantly became intermingled and unwittingly influential in larger than life world events. John Charles Frémont's life runs a somewhat darker parallel. Highly intelligent and ambitious, Frémont crashed head long into the historical events of his day but was consistently overwhelmed by them precisely because of his own self-serving inscrutable morality. Andrew Rolle's choice of Frémont as a subject for psychobiography is akin to taking pot-shots at the broad side of a barn. However, it is the subject's vulnerability in this vein that makes Rolle's work a tremendously interesting, dishy read.
Actually, Rolle's psychological observations are more muted than one might expect. He saves most of his thoughts in this regard for the final chapter, which psychologically deconstructs the subject using the case heretofore constructed. Rolle's two primary psychological analyses of Frémont reside in the loss of his father. As a result of this loss, Rolle examines his ongoing hostility in his relationships with older male authority figures and his narcissistic streak. The older male hostility thesis, while well argued, doesn't quite hit the mark. It seems more likely, through Rolle's own presentation of the facts, that Frémont's precocious early successes meant that those he would inevitably clash with were naturally older in age. Therefore, it is merely circumstantial that those who held sway over Frémont's life happened to be older. On the other hand, Rolle provides a highly compelling case for Frémont-as-narcissist by delving into Frémont's mounting odd behavior during the Civil War.
Frémont's narcissistically driven ambition led him to make rash and often self-destructive decisions, according to Rolle. Frémont's third and fourth expeditions are damning evidence of this aspect of his character. Try as he might, even Rolle is unable to penetrate Frémont's thinking deeply enough to untangle some of the unconscionable decisions made by Frémont regarding these expeditions. Rolle again and again uses the lack of male authority figure as a bromide for Frémont's actions. Although compelling to a certain extent, it simply cannot explain the entire mountain of poor decisions made by the man. Frémont simply placed himself in situations in which he was out of his element and insolated himself so successfully from potentially helpful guidance that he was doomed to remain out of his element while in the eye of many storms. Lack of a male authority figure cannot wholly account for this inability to perceive the difference between right and wrong. In addition, having allowed so many others to defend him in the court of popular opinion, Frémont only singled himself out as a man who, in reality, required much defending. Rolle notes a conversation between Abraham Lincoln's secretary John Hay and Lincoln:
"Frémont would be dangerous if he had more ability and energy," grimaced Hay.
Abraham Lincoln responded with one of his typical anecdotes, "Yes. He is like Jim Jett's brother. Jim used to say that his brother was the d---dest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence he was also the d---dest fool."
As Virginia J. Lass notes in her review of Character as Destiny in The Journal of Southern History, Rolle posits, perhaps, a more illuminating aspect of Frémont's character and personality. Lass gleans from Rolle that "Frémont suffered from arrested emotional development that influenced his actions and decisions as an adult." In other words, Frémont was born on third base and went through his life honestly believing he had hit a triple. Well, to be fair, allotting due for overcoming the financial and societal obstacles of his early years, perhaps he hit a bloop single to center field.
To his credit, Rolle makes every attempt to outline Frémont's contributions to the exploration of the American West. He attempts, to a certain extent, to justify the American public's adoration for Frémont, much of which seems to originate in the propaganda from Jessie's pen. Despite this noble attempt, Frémont remains a lemon and not lemonade.
How does Rolle's psychological analytic approach differ from other contemporary biographies of similar historical figures? Not much. It seems as if Rolle is aware of the desire of his reading audience not to get lost in psychobabble. He treads carefully in this area and, as mentioned before, reserves most of his psychological analysis for closing. However, it is clear that Rolle is necessarily far more interested in Frémont's decision-making process in relationship to the events that formed his life than the events themselves, as previous Frémont historians have done. And, while not especially groundbreaking, it appears to be the most appropriate approach to take with a subject such as Frémont, as opposed to John Wesley Powell, for instance, whose actual achievements in geology and exploration of the America West far outweigh any overriding aspects of personality.
Character as Destiny is a very well written and a highly enjoyable read despite its rather despicable subject. Rolle says of Frémont halfway through the book "Once more nothing had gone his way." On the contrary, everything came easily to this unsavory character, John Charles Frémont, on a silver platter. He simply had a grand knack for consistently knocking the darned thing over.

There were few Americans of the nineteenth century with greater name recognition than John C. Fremont. His five controversial treks across the uncharted Rockies aroused interest and controversy. His military exploits in Mexican California brought him a court-martial. He struck gold in California, became an outspoken abolitionist, and ran as the first Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States. Married into one of America's most powerful political families, he won and then lost a major command in the Union Army. He habitually cheated investors on several continents out of millions of dollars, only to be bankrupted himself by bigger sharks. There is a great story here.

Unfortunately, Andrew Rolle's biography of Fremont is a bit flat, perhaps because of the author's announced intention of probing the psychological motivations behind this life of stupefying behaviors. Rolle states in his preface that he studied psychiatry and psychoanalysis to prepare himself for this work. Most readers will find themselves wishing he had spent more time with cartographers. In a work whose hero is called "The Pathfinder," there is not a single map! It is no exaggeration to say that for literally half the book the reader is never certain exactly where the Pathfinder is.

It is equally fair to say that despite the author's best efforts, we don't get an unprecedented roadmap of Fremont's inner psychological journeys, either. It is clear from the simple factual narrative that Fremont, like Hamilton, was ashamed of his humble origins, that he was blessed or plagued with wanderlust, that he instinctively rebelled against authority figures, that he was addicted to risk taking and suffered significant deficiencies of empathy and moral character. This personality profile would have emerged easily enough from a straightforward telling of the tale, without the baggage of psychoanalytic spin. Curiously, the psychodynamics of Fremont's marriage to his lover/promoter Jessie Benton, are not addressed. The story of the remarkable Jessie, however, is one of the redeeming features of this work.

Since very few readers are likely to be millionaires, there are probably many like me who would like to know how one loses a million dollars. Fremont accomplished this several times, with different commodities, different economies, different schemes, and even different countries. He was a master of losing money imaginatively. Rolle is spotty in his accounts of Fremont's financial empire. The reader is left to surmise that investors were attracted to The Pathfinder's name recognition and that the Fremonts lived beyond their means, but obviously there is much more to this ongoing financial soap opera that can only be guessed at.

The good news for the reader is that warts and all, this is still a reasonably captivating biography. Rolle's style is professional and his character compelling. If at times the reader feels as lost as the disastrous Fourth Expedition, the views from the top and the bottom of Fremont's career are still quite spectacular.

I bought this book for a college class (West Coast Baptist COllege). The book covers how to deal with people in many different scenario settings. It's a little dry (great for a college classroom) but would serve as a great quick reference guide.

Reviewed by THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW. Oct.,1999.

John Charles Fremont was one of the best known of the 19th century explorers of the American western frontier. He tracked his course with the aid of stars and planets. In preparing this first volume of his "Fremont's Greatest Western Exploration" series, John Stewart followed Fremont's course using modern highway and aviation maps. In doing so, Stewart went beyond what library bound researchers and historians could offer because of his own considerable expertise in using concepts of navigation to track Fremont's path in detail. Stewart combines his navigational expertise and love of history with a distinctive flair for writing and communicating Fremont's fascinating excursions with a vivid and informative text that will engage the interest of the history buff, and have much with which to commend itself to the historian and scholar as well.

Many good ESL games and activities.

Written concisely, this is the interesting story of John C. Fremont, an amazing explorer, controversial soldier, and a failure as a Civil War general and a businessman. Black and white illustrations, photographs, and maps add to the book's visual appeal. My fourth grade son really enjoyed reading about Fremont's adventures.

It may have been the turning of a different century, but it was also the turning of the era of popular song and the fledgling Tin Pan Alley industry. There are insights to music that you may remember from your childhood (March of the Toys), and comedy from the era (Please Let Me Sleep and Nobody). But even more, there are certain social issues that have changed very little over time (She Was Happy Till She Met You, I'd Leave Ma Happy Home For You) and one number in particular from English theatre that is seething with entendre (Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow). While these are not the most memorable of the era's pieces, they are well worth looking at again, and hardly a waste of your hard-earned entertainment dollars.

I'm sitting here scratching my head and wondering what happened or failed to happen in this book. Since I gulped down both of Dianne Day's previous books featuring the wonderful character Fremont Jones, its as if I came to a grinding halt while reading this book. Perhaps if I only read this book without the others I would have rated it higher but knowng how much I enjoyed the first two books have altered my opinion of this book.

Following Michael, her love interest to Monterey and the bohemian artist colony there, Fremont takes a job as a lighthouse kepper. And sure enough she is on duty when a young woman's body washes up on shore. As if that wasn't enough, Michael is now calling himself Misha and not only has a new group of artist friends, but also a new lady friend on his arm.

The descriptions of the artist's colony, like Day's descriptions of San Francisco from the early 20th century, were vivid and informative, and the relationship angle between Michael and Fremont is more intriguing, overall something was missing from this latest entry into this series.

In the winter of 1907, Fremont Jones, like thousands of other survivors, is still feeling the aftershock of last year's devastating San Francisco earthquake. She makes up her mind to follow Michael Archer, a man she is attracted to, who has left the city for Carmel. When she reaches Michael's new abode, she finds her former Bay Area neighbor's personality has radically changed into that of a bohemian. With no ties left in San Francisco, Fremont decides to hang around Carmel for a while to try to understand Michael better. She accepts a job as a temporary lighthouse keeper and part time typist.

While on duty, she notices a body wash ashore. No one can identify the deceased, who was wearing a beautiful red dress. Fremont takes the death very personally and becomes determined to learn the dead person's name and insure that she receives a proper burial. She begins to question the nearby citizens in order to identify the victim. As she gets closer to learning the answer, Fremont has placed her own life in jeopardy from someone who wants more than a dead person buried, they desire the entire investigation to be interred with the victim.

The third appearance of Fremont Jones, like the previous two, is a great historical who-done-it that should thrill fans of the mystery genre. THE BOHEMIAN MURDERS is an interesting murder mystery because of the authentic feel of the period and the early twentieth century's most liberated lady, Ms. Jones. Readers who enjoy an entertaining novel set in a bygone era need to read all three Dianne Day's books which are great, great, and great.

This is the third in the series that began with "The Strange Files of Fremont Jones." And it's amazing! It does everything you want a mystery to do. It's even better than the first two of the series, which I would have thought were impossible to top. This hard-to-put-down book is a superb read. Fremont's and Michael's characters continue to evolve, as does their relationship. And the ancillary characters are so much fun! Dianne Day absolutely sets up a world of time and place and mood and drops us in it. This has instantly become one of my all-time favorite reads -- mystery or otherwise. I'm not kidding! More! More!

You know, it used to be that historians would content themselves with wandering into the university or national library to idly pore over musty and ancient tomes and monographs, and that this would constitute the bulk of their research. These days, though, historians are a hardier breed, and they like to race excitedly across the countryside, getting a firsthand glimpse at historical sites and badgering old codgers for oral accounts.

David Roberts is of this latter breed, and it shows in his work. Evidently, he is a mountaineer of some accomplishment: he co-wrote one book with Conrad Anker, who was on the expedition that found Mallory's body on Everest, and yet another with Jon Krakauer of "Into Thin Air" fame. So he was not one to merely read about the exploits of Fremont and Carson; he decided to personally travel in their footsteps, across plain and desert and mountain. Consequently, his book is informed by his own knowledge of travel conditions in the West and his assessment of the various camp sites and surrounding terrain. He has visited most of the key locations and knowledgeably discusses their current conditions.

As for archival material and existing biographies of the duo, Roberts is not at all shy about repeatedly proclaiming his opinions of their merits. Many previous works on Fremont and Carson are dismissed as being factually flawed, overly Freudian, or hopelessly biased. Unlike some previous authors in this field, Roberts was able to draw upon the long-lost secret diaries of Charles Preuss, who accompanied Fremont on his first, second, and fourth expeditions. The Preuss material is an invaluable corrective to the self-serving official histories penned jointly by Fremont and his wife Jessie, and the documents cast Fremont in a far worse light.

Roberts is also sensitive to the Native American side of the story, and goes to considerable lengths to discuss the involvement of Fremont and particularly of Carson in Indian affairs. This might not sit well with readers who uncritically buy into the "Manifest Destiny" school of thought.

On the whole, Carson comes off rather well in this account, as Roberts strives to shift popular opinion away from the revisionist view of the scout as a savage and barbaric Indian killer. Fremont, however, gets relentlessly mauled, and based on the surviving independent accounts of his fourth expedition, rightfully so. His historical accomplishments may have been significant (not so much for original discoveries as for the popularization of westward expansion), but he seems to have been very much lacking as a man.

This is a boldly written and robust survey of the accomplishments of Carson and Fremont, and it definitely has a lot to recommend it. Readers of exploration literature or of the American West will want to pick it up.

I'm beginning to think that one of Dave Roberts' favorite pastimes is debunking, or at the very least shedding new light on, old myths. He did a bang up job in "Great Exploration Hoaxes," and continues here with his examination of John Charles Fremont and Kit Carson.

Fremont, (in case you were like me and had no idea who he was), was a surveyor and leader of 5 expeditions into the west. His fame was due mostly to the fact that he was in the right place at the right time. He also had an industrious, wordsmith for a wife who turned his reports into interesting accounts of his journeys. These, when published, were instantly popular with a public that was just beginning to catch the Wild West Fever.

Nicknamed "The Pathfinder," Fremont actually did very little original exploring. Instead he followed the trails pioneered by the early mountain men who had crisscrossed the western frontier in search of beaver. Fremont's guide on these expeditions was Kit Carson.

Frankly, Kit Carson is by far the more interesting of the two men, and Roberts does a good job of reconstructing a personality which was by nature very private. His job was complicated by the fact that Carson was illiterate and disliked being in the limelight. Nevertheless his actions, which were recorded by many (including Fremont) speak eloquently about the man. This is a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys redisovering history through the eyes of a talented writer.

Somewhere in the American psyche there must be a special place for mildering heroes-those who have't quite turned to dust from complete neglect, kept alive by the constant refocusing of the distorting lens of time and history. John C. Fremont and Kit Carson are prominant among the inhabitants of that place. David Roberts has written a remarkable book that examines these two flawed men who were great American heroes at one time. This is good because both men are too fascinating to be left behind.Kit Carson is examined as the Indian Killer (a perfectly acceptable occupation in 1870) turned advocate(a perfectly acceptable occupation in 2000). Fremont, "The Pathfinder"'s is examined for its brillance-he more than anyone else made manifest destiny possible with the mapping of trails west but popular through his avidly read (but probably written by his wife, Jessie)accounts of his expeditions. Fremont and Kit Carson had a symbiotic relationship on their way to fame. The one time Fremont tried to mount an expedition without Kit Carson as his guide makes for one of the most graphic chapters in this book. Stuck in the mountains in the snow several men die, some resort to cannibalism. This contains well researched information,because Fremont himself convieniently decided not to write a book about that crossing. It might have made the 1856 presidential campaign more raucus than it was(The Pathfinder as the Cannibal Candidate?) A fascinating look at these men, this book was read in a day, and now goes into my reference library. I know I will go back to it often.