Florence Osmund. Regarding Anna. FlorenceOsmund.com, 2015. E-book.

I am pretty sure I had heard about Regarding Anna somewhere, and when BookBub was offering it at a discount, I decided to give it a try. This is pure escapist fun. We care about our narrator Grace Lindroth whose parents died in a weird home accident. She was their only child, and as she is going through their belongings, she discovers a number of photos and other memorabilia that seem to suggest that she was adopted — something that her parents never told her.

The Anna of the title is one Anna Vargas, a native of Mexico who settled in Chicago and herself died in unusual circumstances about half a year after Grace was born. Grace is a young private investigator, really just learning the ropes, but she had majored in law enforcement in college. Her biggest investigation, then, is her own. Yes, she does title searches and other kinds of legwork and investigates suspected marital infidelity. But will she discover her own past? Will she really want to find out what happened?

There are numerous complications. The boarding house where Anna lived and died is now owned by a cranky old lady who wants to know nothing about the home’s previous tenants. Grace shares an office with an immigration attorney of questionable ethics until he kicks her out. And one of her new clients is an orphan, just six months older than Grace who wants to find out more about her birth mother, one Rosa Lindroth — who sounds a lot like Grace’s assumed-to-be-real but possibly adoptive mother.

There are a number of other interesting characters: the handyman who was in love with Anna back in the day, the Marilyn Monroe lookalike legal assistant, and the mysterious Esmeralda, who seems to want to talk and then want to run away.

The people in the past like Grace’s parents and several of the boarders at Anna’s boarding house who are now dead also are very curious people. And then there are secret rooms in more than one house and a hidden attic that may contain secrets from the past as well. Oh yeah, there is money involved, and some people who have spent time in prison for various crimes. And the solution of the mystery itself is very clever and even original.

Osmund does not take us quite into the Chicago rackets, but we get a taste of Chicago in 1964 and 1943 as young Grace learns a lot — yes, about her past, but also about the PI business, and about other people. Why do we do the things we do anyhow?