Part of Series
Charles Westover, a disbarred lawyer, alleges that his runaway teenage daughter has been murdered and he files an insurance claim. And then he disappears, leaving claims investigator, Dave Brandstetter to sort through the pieces of the puzzle. Young women have been murdered by the crazed guru of a bizarre sex cult - is this what happened to Serenity Westover? Brandstetter's investigation, set against vivid Californian backgrounds of expensive seaside suburbs and snowy mountain camps, desert towns and wilderness canyons, takes him on a quest of mounting tensions and ultimate horror. Never has he needed his renowned shrewdness and compassion more. And never has he faced so close a brush with a grisly death.
Author
Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) was an American author of mysteries. The son of a South Dakota shoemaker, he moved to a California citrus farm with his family in 1936. He began publishing poetry in the New Yorker in the 1950s, and joined the editorial teams of gay magazines ONE and Tangents in the 1960s. Using the pseudonyms Rose Brock and James Colton, Hansen published five novels and a collection of short stories before the appearance of Fadeout (1970), the first novel published under his own name. The book introduced street-smart insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter, a complex, openly gay hero who grew and changed over the series’s twelve novels. By the time Hansen concluded the series with A Country of Old Men (1990), Brandstetter was older, melancholy, and ready for retirement. The 1992 recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Hansen published several more novels before his death in 2004. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
