'Fever' is a temperate profile of legendary singer Peggy Lee

Richmond doesn't need to work so hard. Surely, anyone who's heard Lee's voice could never forget it or fail to recognize her as one of the more prominent singers of 20th-century popular music. She could swing with balmy ebullience or cool élan, and, when the mood and moment required it, she could turn a song inside out with a devastating been-done-wrong ache. And, unlike most of her peers, Lee was also an accomplished songwriter.

Lee's autobiography ''Miss Peggy Lee" was published in 1989. Yet ''Fever," named for the singer's sultry signature song, is the first major biography of Lee, a remarkable fact given her long career and often tempestuous life, which ended in 2002.

Born Norma Deloris Egstrom, Lee was raised in North Dakota. Her father was a gentle man with a tendency to drink too much, and when Lee was 4 her mother died shortly after giving birth to her seventh child.

When Lee's father remarried a year later, his young daughter's life took a dark turn. Her new stepmother was a mean-spirited woman who, according to Lee, physically abused her. With such bleakness, the girl's anywhere-but-here yearnings came early, and music provided both ephemeral comfort and hope for a better life. Lee always knew what to do with a song, and she learned to sing along with the sounds of Duke Ellington and Count Basie spilling from her radio.

''With their joyous urgency, their buoyant flow, these songs and anarchic stylings spoke to a girl whose true language, from the very start had been the music inside her," Richmond writes.

By 14, Lee had moved from singing at PTA meetings to performing on the radio, and seven years later she was the featured vocalist with Benny Goodman's band. It wasn't always an easy tenure -- Goodman's withering glare could reduce Lee to tears. Yet her confidence blossomed, and in 1943 she scored her first major hit with the teasing song ''Why Don't You Do Right?"