Showing results by author "Marcia Muller" in All Categories

When a pleasant afternoon's bicycling through Golden Gate Park with a friend ends with the revelation of threatening letters, followed by a gunshot in a mansion garden, Sabina Carpenter knows this is a case that demands her immediate and undivided attention. The questions her partner John Quincannon has to unravel are not difficult: Wrixton, a wealthy banker, has met his extortionist's first demand, but the order to pay another $5,000 is too much to face. The banker's real problem is something he doesn't want to reveal.

P.I. Sharon McCone is sick and tired of San Francisco's persistent rainy weather, so she jumps at the chance to investigate the sabotage of a movie being filmed on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The documentary is based on the writings of Elson Wellbright, a descendant of a missionary family and scholar of Hawaiian culture and history. Wellbright's son is bankrolling the project and has angered many members of the family, who aren't anxious for the film to be completed.

In New York Times bestselling author Marcia Muller's captivating mystery, private detective Sharon McCone's investigation hits closer to home than ever before?Ķ The Color of Fear When a knock on the door in the middle of the night wakes Sharon, she's wholly unprepared for the horrifying news...

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.

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.

New York Times bestselling author Marcia Muller is at her page-turning best in The Breakers, as she digs into a particularly disturbing corner of San Francisco's history--one that Sharon McCone may not escape alive. Sharon gets a request from her former neighbors the Curleys. Their usually...

McCone and Friends contains three stories told by McCone herself, as well as a novella and a short story narrated by the agency’s investigator Rae Kelleher, a story from the viewpoint of its office manager Ted Smalley, an investigation conducted by McCone’s nephew Mick Savage, and one by her long-term lover Hy Ripinsky.

An out-of-state corporation wants to pump the river nearly dry and float the water to southern California's thirsty cities in huge rubber rafts. With lobbyists, lawyers, and dirty tricks, the company intends to get what it wants - any way it can. Against this corporate Goliath, a community protest group and four unusual individuals are drawing a line in the sand.

Drug lords, missing millionaires, corrupt cops… just another day for Carpenter and Quincannon Detective Services. Two missing bodies and two separate investigations take Carpenter and Quincannon from the heights above San Francisco Bay to the depths of Chinatown's opium dens. For John Quincannon, this is a first: searching a Chinatown opium den for his client's husband, missing in the middle of a brewing tong war set to ignite over the stolen corpse of Bing Ah Kee.

A hard, four-hour drive north of San Francisco leads to sparsely populated Soledad County, a combination of spectacular seashore, inland forests, and small towns steeped in gold-mining history. One of those towns is Cyanide Wells, now an artsy community, whose name comes from the miners' use of cyanide to refine ore and the time the area's water supply was tragically poisoned. To Matthew Lindstrom, that sinister legacy is ironically appropriate for the place he finally expects to find his ex-wife, Gwen.

An unidentified woman's body washes up at nearby Point Deception, immediately stirring up old feelings of fear and suspicion. Relentless in pursuing his story, and haunted by a tragedy in his own past, Newberry does not let up, instilling fear in the town's sheriff, Rhoda Swift, who fears his prying will destroy her town. But as more women die and public panic sets in, Newberry and Swift form an uneasy alliance and unite in a confrontation with a killer whose motives are not as random as they seem.

Private Investigator Sharon McCone goes undercover to investigate the murders of two Indigenous women in remote Northern California in this gripping, atmospheric mystery in the New York Times bestselling series. "Muller's series remains a gold standard for female detective stories.'' —Kirkus...

In this twisting mystery in a New York Times bestselling series, pranks escalate into a deadly scheme that Private Investigator Sharon McCone must unravel—​before they claim her life. San Francisco is home to more than 200 privately owned streets. Most are alleyways, but a select few are...

Joanna Stark thought she had finally left her troubled past behind. After the death of her husband, she quit the San Francisco art security firm where she was a partner and retreated to the small California wine country town of Sonoma. But unexpectedly, in one rainy week before Thanksgiving, her carefully constructed world collapses. A Frans Hals painting, The Cavalier in White, is stolen from the M.H. de Young Museum.

Joanna Stark can't seem to forgive and forget; what happened 20 years ago still plagues her. She knows the only way it can be resolved is if she gets her revenge. So she devises an intricately-plotted plan to entrap and expose Anthony Parducci, an art thief who also happens to be her worst enemy and a man who once, a long time ago, she truly cared about.

Can the true identity of the Sherlock Holmes imposter be revealed at last? Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon are no stranger to mysteries. In the five years since they opened Carpenter and Quinncannon, Professional Detective Services, they have solved dozens, but one has eluded even them: Sherlock Holmes or, rather, the madman claiming his identity who keeps showing up with a frustrating - though admittedly useful - knack for solving difficult cases.

A debutante's missing body, murder most foul, and weird spectrallights in the fog make for a thrilling gas light-era tale of mystery and detection. In 1895 San Francisco young debutantes don't commit suicide at festive parties, particularly not under the eye of Sabina Carpenter. But Virginia St. Ives evidently did, leaping from a foggy parapet in a shimmer of ghostly light.