Vera Moonachie is writing a mystery with criminal lawyer Fulton Yee. He won't tell her the murderer, so she won't drop hints. Abruptly, Fulton disappears. Now caught in a murder investigation, Vera goes to the storied Sacramento Delta to unravel the tangled skein of a bloody murder planned to resolve an old Sacramento Delta land dispute. Vera is drawn into the bizarre lives of an aging actor, a chef, and the hornet's nest of Fulton's feuding trio of lovers. As she walks a knife's edge between brutal rivals in an authorship dispute, Vera must find Fulton; find out why he disappeared; and find...

Vera Moonachie is writing a mystery with criminal lawyer Fulton Yee. He won't tell her the murderer, so she won't drop hints. Abruptly, Fulton disappears. Now caught in a murder investigation, Vera goes to the storied Sacramento Delta to unravel the tangled skein of a bloody murder planned to resolve an old Sacramento Delta land dispute. Vera is drawn into the bizarre lives of an aging actor, a chef, and the hornet's nest of Fulton's feuding trio of lovers. As she walks a knife's edge between brutal rivals in an authorship dispute, Vera must find Fulton; find out why he disappeared; and find...

High in his outrageous apartment over a brewery, a stock market genius plots four simultaneous bank robberies at one intersection. The police receive four alarms and ignore them thinking it has to be an error. The genius codes his plans with palindromes to hide them. In 1923, the abrasive dry laws only add more confusion to an already addled, overworked police department riven with the politically ambitious and inept criminal investigation department. Consequently, the solution of the crimes falls to a retired forensics cop, who is now a Chinese restaurant chef, and his protege, who has...