City of Whispers

August 22, 2011
An e-mailed cry for help from Sharon McCone’s troubled half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, sucks McCone into a treacherous vortex of madness, greed, and murder in bestseller Muller’s exciting 30th mystery starring the no-nonsense San Francisco PI (after 2010’s Coming Back). Though McCone, still recovering from the bullet to the brain that nearly killed her, has pressing problems of her own, she and nephew/operative Mick Savage must hustle to find the psychologically deteriorating Darcy, who’s disappeared. Their urgency increases as clues seem to link him with the unsolved strangling of a young heiress two years earlier—and a pair of fresher corpses. Alternating chapters narrated by different characters add to the suspense of the intricate plot, which propels readers through a San Francisco few tourists see—from Colma, the city’s necropolis, to the exclusive mansions of Sea Cliff—and to a harrowing, haunting denouement.

September 1, 2011

Sharon McCone's 29th case is a search for her half brother.

McCone, who has two dysfunctional families to deal with—three if you count the father she recently located—receives an e-mail asking for help from her half brother Darcy Blackhawk, a druggie and petty thief who's been in and out of trouble all his life. To soothe Saskia, their birth mother, McCone asks her private-investigation agency's techno-nerd Mick Savage to troll San Francisco Internet cafes and see whether Darcy can be found. The trail focuses on a remark Darcy made about Gaby and a coral tree in a cemetery. Gaby, it turns out, has been dead two years, possibly a suicide but more probably a murder victim. Someone who's stashed Darcy away keeps sticking hyper-drug doses in his arms when he can't tell where some secret tapes have gone. McCone and Mick, hot on the trail, locate Gaby's legal guardian, now in sole charge of her inherited millions. They also identify The Four Musketeers, a group Gaby was involved with while doing volunteer work at a shelter, and learn that, slowly but surely, the quartet is being killed off. Mick will be attacked, McCone will be shot at and Hy Ripinsky, McCone's husband, will thwart a ransom demand before Darcy is once more settled in a comfy psych ward for detoxing.

A glib but neatly plotted adventure from an author whose heroine has almost as many relatives (Coming Back, 2010, etc.) as fans.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011

Don't even consider missing the latest Sharon McCone (Coming Back) case. Trouble strikes from within when Sharon's half-brother Darcy is in danger. [See Prepub Alert, 8/2/11.]

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2011
Muller's sleuth, Sharon McCone, has a new, intensely personal case. Still feeling some residual effects from being shot in the head (Locked In, 2009), Sharon receives an e-mail from her mentally ill half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, asking for help. When he fails to reply to her response, she gets worried and looks for him. The message came from a computer at an Internet caf' in San Francisco, a city that Darcy has never visited. As Sharon searches for him, she finds the body of a young woman at the Palace of Fine Arts. A witness says that Darcy was heading there. The search widens, and Sharon finds links to the unsolved murder of a banking heiress. She needs to solve both cases to find her brother and ensure his safety, putting herself and her family in danger. The case makes Sharon appreciate her diverse, sometimes dysfunctional family and reinforces her love for her husband, Hy. As Sharon celebrates another birthday, devoted readers will appreciate all the more both the groundbreaking nature of this series (the first to star a female PI in hard-boiled fiction) and the fact that, throughout her long run, Sharon has aged gracefully and matured as a heroine and a woman.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2011

Sharon McCone's 29th case is a search for her half brother.

McCone, who has two dysfunctional families to deal with--three if you count the father she recently located--receives an e-mail asking for help from her half brother Darcy Blackhawk, a druggie and petty thief who's been in and out of trouble all his life. To soothe Saskia, their birth mother, McCone asks her private-investigation agency's techno-nerd Mick Savage to troll San Francisco Internet cafes and see whether Darcy can be found. The trail focuses on a remark Darcy made about Gaby and a coral tree in a cemetery. Gaby, it turns out, has been dead two years, possibly a suicide but more probably a murder victim. Someone who's stashed Darcy away keeps sticking hyper-drug doses in his arms when he can't tell where some secret tapes have gone. McCone and Mick, hot on the trail, locate Gaby's legal guardian, now in sole charge of her inherited millions. They also identify The Four Musketeers, a group Gaby was involved with while doing volunteer work at a shelter, and learn that, slowly but surely, the quartet is being killed off. Mick will be attacked, McCone will be shot at and Hy Ripinsky, McCone's husband, will thwart a ransom demand before Darcy is once more settled in a comfy psych ward for detoxing.

A glib but neatly plotted adventure from an author whose heroine has almost as many relatives (Coming Back, 2010, etc.) as fans.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)