The very first Sharon McCone mystery.

This is the 1st of the Sharon McCone books. I discovered it while waiting for a friend at a community college library. I was so enthralled I made her check it out for me, I hadn’t enrolled yet, the class I wanted was full.
Private Eye Sharon McCone is hired by All Souls Cooperative, a San Francisco legal services provider, to discover who is vandalizing a small street of antique shops. When one of the antique dealer is found in her shop murdered, Sharon doesn’t feel confident in the poliice’s ability to discover the killer, especially since the patronizing Lieutenant Marcus is in charge of the case. After he dismisses the work she has done so far, without even looking at it, Sharon decides she must investigate.
Naturally she is barred from the crime scene and naturally she manages to sneak in, some of the street cops are her buddies. She is strangely attracted to a little boy mannequin with strange iron shoes that Joan Albright kept in her shop, across from the cash register. Sharon know that Joan talked to the mannequin freqently and she just feels there is something about this object that is relevant.
Suspects abound and Lt. Marcus is not happy with her and tries to block her investigation. As Sharon comes closer to solving the case, she also comes close to becoming a victim herself. ( )

Kirkus Reviews San Francisco's Sharon McCone, staff investigator for a Legal Services co-op and deliverer of remarks like "I don't have to have to be romantically involved with someone to feel complete," is no doubt supposed to be everybody's favorite liberated shamusette. So why does she tremble so much? She trembles when she sees the stabbed body of antique-dealer Joan Albritton (a Legal Services ex-client), she trembles when land-development and smuggling schemes come to light, she even trembles when she's in danger of being caught gate-crashing at a real-estaters' conference. In any event, few readers will tremble as Sharon's tame and tepid investigation takes her into the antique-and-art world (not especially well detailed), into car chases and such with thugs (some nice Frisco geography), and into the arms (well, almost) of Lieut. Gregory Marcus, Homicide, "a wolf in misogynist's clothing.
(Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1977) ( )

An adequate and satisfying mystery set in 1970’s San Francisco and revolving around a murder in an antique shop. The back cover blurbs comment on the “tough,” “spunky” and “liberated” (“we finally have one”, etc.) private eye, Sharon McCone. I liked her, and apparently she was sort of a modern female pioneer, at least in the realistic/hard-boiled/contemporary school of detective fiction. (I owe this insight to a hint from Kung_BaiRen’s review below.) But aren’t all detectives, male or female, by definition spunky? I didn’t like McCone’s eventual pick for a boyfriend, but I guess liberated women shouldn’t have to defend their dating choices. ( )

Mystery writers as skillful as Sara Paretsky and as mediocre as Sue Grafton give Marcia Muller credit for being the pioneer of the female hard-boiled private investigator. Even in her first novel, "Edwin of the Iron Shoes" (1977), Muller deftly narrates a fast-paced story. Though as long as 178 pages, it reads fast like a short Simenon. PI Sharon McCone investigates for the All Souls legal services cooperative in San Francisco. Antique dealer Joan Albritton has been slashed to death. McCone pokes around Joan’s neighborhood which has an assortment of dealers of antiques and junk. Muller effectively captures the edgy mood of McCone staking out the victim’s shop at night. Other plusses: not too much local color (readers don’t care if they don’t live there or haven't visited), lots of personality and life’s usual messes.