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 dependable daughter, Chelle, hasn't answered their calls in over a week. Would Sharon check on her?
Chelle, a house flipper, has been living at her latest rehab project: a Prohibition-era nightclub known as the Breakers, formerly a favored watering hole for San Francisco's elite, now converted into a run-down apartment building. There's something sinister about the quirky space, and Sharon quickly discovers why. Lurking in a secret room between two floors is a ghastly art gallery: photos and drawings of mass murderers, long ago and recent. Jack the Ripper. The Zodiac and Zebra killers. Charles Manson. What, an alarmed Sharon wonders, was Chelle doing in this chamber of horrors?
And as Sharon begins to suspect that the ghoulish collage may be more than just a leftover relic of the Breakers' checkered history, her search for Chelle becomes a desperate race against the clock before a killer strikes again.
"[Marcia Muller's] stories crackle like few others on the mystery landscape." -- San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
"Muller undoubtedly remains one of today's best mystery writers." -- Associated Press
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“Marcia Muller was among the first to send a female private detective down the mean streets of modern American crime fiction when Sharon McCone, Muller’s San Francisco sleuth, solved her first case in 1977, doing investigative work for the All Souls Legal Cooperative. More than thirty books into the series, McCone is still on the job, now working for her own firm. The Breakers finds her down by Ocean Beach, looking for Michelle (Chelle) Curley, who restores old houses and hasn’t been seen since she entered her latest project, a bedraggled 1903 mansion known as the Breakers. McCone methodically inspects the entire house, hesitating only when she comes upon a pictorial rogues gallery of California serial killers enshrined in the attic. Although this macabre exhibition doesn’t cause McCone to alter her coolly professional narrative voice, it makes her wonder about the note Chelle left behind: ‘I’ve got a right to disappear.’”
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New York Times Book Review