Showing results by author "Marcia Muller" in All Categories

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.

It's a cold Sunday in San Francisco. Sharon McCone's alone on a routine surveillance job, following a man named Frank Wilkonson through the city's lush horticultural hot spots to the sere foothills of the Diablos. But when she returns to find her kindly old client in a pool of blood, nothing she's learned explains it. The search for answers takes her from Wilkonson's sullen brood on Burning Oak Ranch, to the eccentric havoc of a household in the Haight, to Golden Gate Park and the desperate digs of the homeless.

Bobby Foster, car-hop at the chic Cafe Comedie, is going to the gas chamber. He's already confessed to the murder of Tracy Kostakos, the club's rising star. But two years after the crime, Tracy's body is still missing and Bobby's confession is full of holes. All Souls Legal Cooperative's final appeal sends San Francisco's number-one P.I., Sharon McCone, behind the footlights into the super-charged arena of anxious club owners and aspiring young hopefuls...into the fractured world of Tracy's priviledged family and the mind of a young comedienne who was not the good little girl they thought they knew....

Settled in to their new home after they lost their house in a fire, and fully established in their new shared offices, private investigator Sharon McCone and her business partner husband, Hy, are finally starting to feel comfortable. That calm is shattered when Hy's former colleague, Gage Renshaw - a shady troublemaker whom they presumed dead - reappears, and it's unclear what he wants from his prosperous former associate.

A full-fledged pilot for several years, Sharon McCone is due for the biannual flight review required by the FAA. Her former flight instructor, Matty Wildress, invites her to fly up to the small Sonoma County town of Los Alegres for the evaluation. The test isn't due for several months, however, and McCone suspects Matty has more than safe flying on her mind.

It looked like a lost cause. Convicted of a brutal society murder in 1956, Lis Benedict had served a long sentence and just been released from jail. Then in a last desperate attempt to clear the Benedict name, her daughter Judy convinces All Souls Legal Cooperative to take her mother's case before the Historical Tribunal. Sharon McCone loves a challenge but has little affection for the cold and unlikable Lis. Then, suddenly, the woman in question is dead, a vicious threat is scrawled in red paint across the front of Sharon’s house, and San Francisco’s number-one private investigator is following a fresh trail of death.

Ricky Savage is Sharon McCone's brother-in-law, and the hottest country singer in the business. He's on top professionally, but hitting rock bottom in his personal life. His longtime marriage to Sharon's sister, Charlene, is breaking up, forcing him to question if it was all worth it: the struggle, hard times, and hopes of stardom that finally came true. Even worse, Ricky has been getting anonymous letters threatening not only himself, but also his children.

There's trouble in Sharon McCone's quiet San Francisco apartment building. Madame Anya, with her cards, her tamed crow, and her candles, had predicted evil for Molly Antonio. Linnea Carraway, drinking heavily and careening in the wake of a divorce, had argued with her. Now the sweet, elderly lady lies dead in her apartment. Linnea, last to see Molly alive, is the prime suspect and if Sharon means to clear her best friend, she has to find the murderer fast.

Picture Salmon Bay: an isolated, run-down northern California village, home to an idle fleet of fishing boats, a deserted amusement park, and a handful of secretive, even hostile residents. When private investigator Sharon McCone arrives in search of one of the town's wayward daughters, the trail leads to the thriving resort of Port San Marco. McCone believes that the missing woman, a former social worker named Jane Anthony, was involved in the suspicious deaths of three terminally ill patients at an exclusive hospice.

When the bodies of two Indigenous women are found in the wilderness of Northern California, it is only the latest horrific development in a string of similar crimes in the area. Despite all evidence to the contrary, officials rule the deaths isolated incidents, which soon join the ranks of countless other unsolved cases quickly dismissed by law enforcement. In a town where too many injustices are tolerated or brushed under the rug, only a few people remain who refuse to let a killer walk free. But Private Investigator Sharon McCone is one of those few.

When a former sixties radical is murdered during a string of random sniper attacks, the All Souls Legal Cooperative must settle his surprisingly large estate. Then private investigator Sharon McCone comes across a new will, made just days before he died, that disinherits his two children in favor of four unknown and unconnected parties. McCone sifts through Perry Hilderly’s belongings but finds little to explain this puzzling change. That is, until she uncovers a .357 with the serial number burned off.

To tourists, bay-windowed Victorian mansions are quaint, peaceful symbols of old San Francisco, but on the secluded hill above Steiner Street, the gingerbread has sparked a bitter battle. Ambitious developers are pushing for restoration and residents are fighting for their homes… until a controversial restorationist is found dead on the job, awash in garish housepaint. Private investigator Sharon McCone is called in only to discover a second bitter feud, this time between the developers and members of the city's powerful architectural community.

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.

Amid the shifting world of San Francisco flea markets, shady vendors sell junk, precious antiques, and stolen goods side by side. Somewhere in the mix, a priceless collection of sacred Torah scrolls is gathering dust - and attracting a group of fanatical killers. When private investigator Sharon McCone helps one flea market kingpin fend off a stalker, she's drawn into the netherworld of deal-making and thievery, a dangerous milieu seldom seen by outsiders.

Appleby Island, once the magnificent home of a tycoon and planter, is a place of history and mystery in the Sacramento delta. Its story includes hints of tragedy, fueling rumors that ghosts still walk its derelict orchards. Now Patsy McCone, her new lover, and a group of invetors are turning the old mansion into an elegant bed and breakfast.

On a foggy summer morning, private investigator Sharon McCone receives a call from her former neighbors, the Curleys. Their usually dependable daughter Chelle hasn't been answering their calls for weeks. Would Sharon check on her? Sharon arranges to visit the building Chelle had been living in and rehabbing in southwest San Francisco. Once it was a nightclub and bar, she learns, and a favorite destination for the city's elite during Prohibition. But there's something sinister about the space, and Sharon quickly discovers why.

San Francisco is home to more than 200 privately owned streets. Most are alleyways, but a select few are lined with mansions and elaborate gardens. When several luxury estate homes are targeted in a series of so-called pranks, Sharon is hired by a coalition of concerned owners to investigate. But as things escalate—an attempt on Sharon’s life, an explosion at a meth lab, and a shocking murder—Sharon realizes far more is at play than a few misdemeanors gone wrong. The case takes a sudden turn when one of McCone & Ripinsky’s most trusted employees is implicated.

The McCone Files gathers all of Sharon's short cases into a single volume covering her entire career as staff investigator at All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco. From the death of a clown in Diablo Valley to the disappearance of a young socialite on the Golden Gate Bridge, from the murder of a teenage gang leader in San Francisco to the drowning of an aged Japanese herb-gatherer, and from streets filled with juvenile runaways to the quietness of a mausoleum, Sharon investigates.

A knock on the door in the middle of the night. It can only be bad news, and it is: Sharon's father, Elwood, has been the victim of a vicious, racially motivated attack. A nationally recognized Shoshone Indian artist, he'd been visiting Sharon for the holidays, browsing for gifts in San Francisco's exclusive Marina District, when he was set upon by a mob of angry young men. Now Elwood lies in a coma, hovering between life and death.

In The Bughouse Affair, the first of a new series of lighthearted historical mysteries set in 1890s San Francisco, former Pinkerton operative Sabina Carpenter and her detective partner, ex-Secret Service agent John Quincannon, undertake what initially appear to be two unrelated investigations. The two cases eventually connect in surprising fashion, but not before two murders and assorted other felonies complicate matters even further. And not before the two sleuths are hindered, assisted, and exasperated by the bughouse Sherlock Holmes.