Private eye Sharon McCone receives an e-mail asking for help from her emotionally disturbed half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, but he fails to reply to her response. As her search widens, Sharon uncovers a connection to an unsolved murder of a young woman who was heiress to a multi-million dollar fortune.

"Here is Marcia Muller's stalwart heroine Sharon McCone as you've never seen her before, in a new novel set in California's high desert country"--Provided by the publisher.

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

When she is hired to investigate devil worshippers performing human sacrifices in San Francisco, private detective Sharon McCone discovers what her clients are really up to and goes undercover to find the truth.

"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....