|
Spines creased, cupped. Edges worn, corners bumped and bent. Pages lightly toned. Book descriptions in series order.
It's Sharon McCone's first case as staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative. She knows nothing about antiques, yet she has an affection for Salem Street with its charming mix of antique and curio shops. Now elderly dealer Joan Albritton has been found dead, stabbed with an antique dagger. Her neighbors are shocked. Recurring vandalism has them frightened. Ferreting out the facts will take Sharon from the chaotic jumble of the junk dealer's establishment to a museum where San Francisco's most elegant socialites gather. But it is not until she is alone in Joan's dark shop with Clothilde, the headless dressmaker's dummy; Bruno, the stuffed German shepherd; and Edwin, the little boy mannequin in the ornate iron shoes that she will have the chance to discover the murderous secret someone will kill -- and kill again -- to keep. ***
The Globe Apartments, six stories of decaying brick and concrete, rises above San Francisco's volatile Tenderloin district. The seedy former hotel, once a haven for the city's down and out, now houses Vietnamese families striving to improve their lives. But private eye Sharon McCone believes that someone from the Tenderloin's shadowy underworld is determined to drive the newcomers out. The suspects range from the colorful to the dangerous: a poetry-loving drifter, a mean-spirited preacher, a flower seller with a deadly touch, an enterprising photographer, and a developer who'd like nothing better than to unload his worst investment - the Globe Hotel.
When the All Souls Legal Cooperative is called upon to stop the patterns of intimidation, resentment explodes into murder. As McCone takes up the refugees' cause, she is drawn into the depths of the city's most hated industry - and into the secrets of San Francisco's buried past. *** Private detective Sharon McCone takes on the case of former crack addict Bobby Foster, who had confessed to and been convicted of the kidnap-slaying of a woman whose body had not yet been found. *** Private eye Sharon McCone's twelfth mystery now in paperback. Responding to a former colleague's request for help, Sharon McCone travels to the high-desert town of Tufa Lake, California, to track down a commercial mining operation that could seriously damage the ecosystem . . . and a killer bent on even deadlier destruction. Fans of Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton . . . are in for a treat.--Kansas City Star. *** In the biggest professional move of her life, Sharon is cutting her umbilical cord of All Soul's Legal Cooperative and opening her own shop. But even before the phone lines are installed, McCone Investigations gets its first case - one that lifts Sharon off a roof in a helicopter and deposits her on a posh hideaway on the north California coast. Her new client is T.J. Gordon, a "turnaround man" - that rare breed of corporate troubleshooter who creates profits and enemies while reviving failing companies. Gordon owns more than the helicopter that whisks Sharon away... much more. And he's not really "new." A friend from her radical student days in Berkeley, T.J. was a campus nomad with a lifestyle shadier than most. Now T.J. Gordon - grown ever more quirky, eccentric, and reclusive - is convinced someone is trying to kill him. He wants Sharon's help. Then he does another kind of turnaround: he vanishes. Hanging in the balance with T.J.'s life is his latest project, a visionary deal to revitalize an abandoned stretch of the San Francisco waterfront. His zigzag trail will lead Sharon both to Lost Hope, Nevada, a desert ghost town transformed into a booming tourist mecca with a mysterious long-buried corpse...and to Monora, a decaying Pennsylvania steel town where old resentments simmer beneath the grim shadow of empty mills. The clues are baffling and include a hermit in a hovel built of bottles and the saddened father of a missing union organizer. As the bizarre pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, Sharon is desperate to find T.J. - headed toward his deadly confrontation with his California dreams. |