While researching a character for her bestselling book The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart discovered a story that had been lost to time. In 1915, a man named Henry Kaufman ran his car into a horse-drawn carriage driven by three sisters: Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp. They got into a conflict over payment for the damages, and it escalated from there. The sisters received kidnapping threats, shots were fired at their house, and they were generally tormented for almost a year. When the sheriff enlists Constance’s help in convicting the men, she is forced to confront her past and defend her family—and she does it in a way that few women of that era would have dared.
Amy Stewart’s novel Girl Waits with Gun is based on the true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs, a story that has largely been forgotten until now. It is the first book in a series that will re-tell the entire life story of Constance, including her intelligence work during World War I and the detective agency she started and ran with her sisters.
Stewart is also the author of six previous works of nonfiction, including four New York Times bestsellers—The Drunken Botanist, Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, and Flower Confidential. She and her husband also run an independent bookstore called Eureka Books in Eureka, California.
Before the event, enjoy a "New Jersey Automobile," a specialty cocktail dating to the 1910s, created by Amy Stewart to complement her novel.