Emma Donoghue's 'Frog Music' really sings

FROG MUSIC, by Emma Donoghue. Little, Brown; 405 pp., $27.

Emma Donoghue's latest novel has many facets, all of them fascinating. Like her short-story collection "Astray" and her novel "Slammerkin," "Frog Music" is a detailed slice of historical drama, this time set in the festering boomtown of San Francisco in 1876. Like her hair-raising best-seller "Room," it incorporates the elements of a thriller. Best of all, there's Donoghue's familiar and intricate examination of women in impossible circumstances, bound to repugnant men for survival but never broken by them.

"Frog Music" is based on a true story, the unsolved murder of a cross-dressing frog catcher named Jeanne Bonnet, here called Jenny. (If you can resist the phrase "cross-dressing frog catcher," you really need to examine your lack of curiosity.) In the opening pages, Jenny is shot through the window of a boardinghouse in the company of Blanche Beunon, a burlesque dancer and prostitute.

Blanche has known Jenny for only a few weeks when she dies -- they met when Jenny ran her down on a bicycle. Still, Blanche grieves, and she spends the next several days trying to track down Jenny's killer, sure she was the intended victim. The main suspects are her estranged, dandified lover, Arthur, and his sidekick, Ernest, freeloaders and former acrobats who gamble away Blanche's earnings. Furious at her refusal to work so she can care for her infant son, they spirit the child away, leaving a frantic Blanche to search for him, too.

Blanche acts as a guide through the seamy, steamy city by the bay, which is undergoing a brutal, uncharacteristic heat wave and a massive smallpox outbreak. Both plagues have set the citizens on edge, as have long-simmering tensions with Chinese workers filling the city's tenements. Donoghue revisits an older and in some ways more horrifying version of the shed where a small boy grows up captive in "Room," exposing the shocking practice of baby farming, in which unsavory individuals are paid to take in unwanted infants -- and then treacherously neglect them.

The mystery isn't merely about who shot Jenny; there's also the question of the person Blanche will become. Will she stay a prostitute? Or will she break free from the men controlling her? Early on, Jenny had told her, "If you meet an obstacle you can jump free." She's talking about riding the bicycle on crowded city streets, but by the novel's end, Blanche sees another, more important lesson. "Not always," Blanche thinks. "You have to allow for some damage." Damaged or not, she has a choice, one that will keep you riveted as you make your way through this vibrant and remarkable novel.