The Big Man's Daughter

The Big Man's Daughter by Owen Fitzstephen continues the story of the characters first introduced in Fitzstephen's previous novel, Hammett—characters based on the "true" figures who served as inspiration for Dashiell Hammett's ragged cast of misfits in The Maltese Falcon. This time, the story revolves around Rita Gaspereaux, the Big Man's eighteen-year-old daughter, the only character whose fictional doppelganger is left unaccounted for at the end of Hammett's classic novel. So what happened to the "real" girl?
It is 1922. Suddenly "orphaned," Rita Gaspereaux must now navigate alone the criminal world of her murdered father and his newly imprisoned associates, all the time haunted by insistent tales of a blackbird statuette reputed to possess otherworldly, wish-fulfilling powers. Fortunately for Rita, she learned much about surviving on the fringes of decent society from her con-artist father. But did she learn enough? What helps young Rita to...