It's Sharon McCone's first case as staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative. She knows nothing about antiques, yet she has an affection for Salem Street with its charming mix of antique and curio shops. Now elderly dealer Joan Albritton has been found dead, stabbed with an antique dagger. Her neighbors are shocked. Recurring vandalism has them frightened. Ferreting out the facts will take Sharon from the chaotic jumble of the junk dealer's establishment to a museum where San Francisco's most elegant socialites gather. But it is not until she is alone in Joan's dark shop with Clothilde, the headless dressmaker's dummy; Bruno, the stuffed German shepherd; and Edwin, the little boy mannequin in the ornate iron shoes that she will have the chance to discover the murderous secret someone will kill—and kill again—to keep.

There's trouble in Sharon McCone's quiet San Francisco apartment building. Madame Anya, with her cards, her tame crow, and her candles, had predicted evil for Molly Antonio. Linnea Carraway, drinking heavily and careening crazily in the wake of a divorce, had argued with her. Now the sweet, elderly lady lies in her apartment. Linnea, last to see Molly alive, is the prime suspect and if Sharon means to clear her best friend, she has to find the murderer fast. Suddenly death is in the cards, threatening Sharon's oldest friendship, her professional credibility-and her life.

Investigating her friend's murder, private eye Sharon McCone follows a trail into San Francisco's glamorous architectural community in search of a very valuable clue—a Tiffany lamp adorned with the grinning face of a Cheshire Cat. Reissue.

Picture Salmon Bay: an isolated, run-down northern California village, home to an idle fleet of fishing boats, a deserted amusement park, and a handful of secretive, even hostile residents. When private investigator Sharon McCone arrives in search of one of the town's wayward daughters, the train leads to the thriving resort of Port San Marco. McCone believes that the missing woman, a former social worker named Jane Anthony, was involved in the suspicious deaths of three terminally ill patients at an exclusive hospice.

"A further paperback mystery featuring private eye Sharon McCone, who finds herself in a battle against time as she tries to clear a client's name, unravel the case of a missing Hebrew scroll, and keep one step ahead of a determined killer."

Sharon McCone has come home to her warm, troubled family, to San Diego and a convention of private detectives in a posh seaside hotel. For Sharon it's a chance to catch up with old friends—all except for the one who fell four stories from one of the hotel spires. Now, Sharon is determined to find out why her friend died. Martin's Press.

The Globe Apartments, six stories of decaying brick and concrete, rises above San Francisco's volatile Tenderloin district. The seedy former hotel, once a haven for the city's down and out, now houses Vietnamese families striving to improve their lives. But private eye Sharon McCone believes that someone from the Tenderloin's shadowy underworld is determined to drive the newcomers out. The suspects range from the colorful to the dangerous: a poetry-loving drifter, a mean-spirited preacher, a flower seller with a deadly touch, an enterprising photographer, and a developer who'd like nothing better than to unload his worst investment - the Globe Hotel. When the All Souls Legal Cooperative is called upon to stop the patterns of intimidation, resentment explodes into murder. As McCone takes up the refugees' cause, she is drawn into the depths of the city's most hated industry - and into the secrets of San Francisco's buried past.

Appleby Island, once the magnificent home of a tycoon and planter, is a place of history and mystery in the Sacramento delta. Its story includes hints of tragedy, fueling rumors that ghosts still walk its derelict orchards. Now Patsy McCone, her new lover, and a group of investors are turning the old mansion into an elegant bed and breakfast inn. Summoned by her eccentric younger sister, San Francisco's #1 P.I. Sharon McCone arrives in the teeth of a gale, taking a busman's holiday to investigate mysterious acts of vandalism that are running the project to ruin. But when simple sabotage escalates to savage murder, she finds herself trapped on the island with a desperate killer—and flung into a raging storm of treachery, violence, and sudden death.

Private eye Sharon McCone takes on a routine surveillance as a favor to a friend, and her target's day proceeds normally until he is murdered

Bobby Foster, car-hop at the chic Cafe Comedie, is going to the gas chamber. He's already confessed to the murder of Tracy Kostakos, the club's rising star. But two years after the crime, Tracy's body is still missing and Bobby's confession is full of holes. All Souls Legal Cooperative's final appeal sends San Francisco's #1 P.I. Sharon McCone behind the footlights into the super-charged arena of anxious club owners and aspiring young hopefuls...into the fractured world of Tracy's privileged family and the mind of a young comedienne who was not the good little girl they thought they knew...into a labyrinth of death and deception where someone will kill to laugh last and get away with murder.

When a former sixties radical is murdered during a string of random sniper attacks, the All Souls Legal Cooperative must settle his surprisingly large estate. Then private investigator Sharon McCone comes across a new will, made just days before he died, that disinherits his two children in favor of four unknown and unconnected parties. McCone sifts through Perry Hilderly's belongings, but finds little to explain this puzzling change - until she uncovers a .357 with the serial number burned off.

Private eye Sharon McCone's twelfth mystery now in paperback. Responding to a former colleague's request for help, Sharon McCone travels to the high-desert town of Tufa Lake, California, to track down a commercial mining operation that could seriously damage the ecosystem . . . and a killer bent on even deadlier destruction. "Fans of Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton . . . are in for a treat".—Kansas City Star.

It looked like a lost cause. Convicted of a brutal society murder in 1956, Lis Benedict had served a long sentence and just been released from jail. Then in a last desperate attempt to clean the Benedict name, her daughter Judy convinced All Souls Legal Cooperative to take her mother's case before the Historical Tribunal. Sharon McCone loves a challenge but has little affection for the cold and unlikeable Lis. Then, suddenly, the woman in question is dead, a vicious threat is scrawled in read paint across the front of Sharon's house, and San Francisco's #1 P.I. is following a fresh trail of death that leads back to a wild debutante, a prestigious think tank, and the power politics of the '50s...all in search of a killer who has engineered a fatal cover-up and built a brilliant career on murder.

Successful in her investigative work for All Souls Legal Cooperative, happy with her newly renovated house, and feeling somewhat more secure in her relationship with the mysterious environmental activist, Hy Ripinsky, Sharon is shocked to find herself suddenly faced with a wrenching ultimatum. No longer a small, informal co-op, All Souls has grown. New legal partners, exasperated with Sharon's free-wheeling ways, want to kick her upstairs with a raise, perks, and a "career opportunity" that will chain her to a desk forever. Offered a take-it-or-leave-it deal, Sharon is in turmoil. And to make matters worse, Hy has disappeared. His abandoned plane, wrecked rental car, and a road map point to RKI, a firm of international security consultants with a reputation for questionable, unorthodox tactics and clients engaged in controversial research. Sharon discovers that they hired Hy as a free-lance operative and that they, too, are looking for him. Determined to find out what has happened, Sharon pushes aside her career concerns at All Souls and plunges into a search that will force her to take unlikely sanctuary in her abandoned San Diego childhood home and find and unexpected ally in her wild, unpredictable brother John. From the drive-by hiring hall for illegal aliens in Imperial Beach to an opulent villa on the Mexican coast, she will track down every clue in a complex plot that builds to a breathtaking climax on the treacherous canyon trails that lead back across the border. There, in a no-man's-land where terrified pollos defy la migra in a desperate bid for freedom...and where decisions won't wait, Sharon must make the tough choices that put her own life, her own freedom, and everythingshe holds dear at deadly risk.

In the biggest professional move of her life, Sharon is cutting her umbilical cord of All Soul's Legal Cooperative and opening her own shop. But even before the phone lines are installed, McCone Investigations gets its first case - one that lifts Sharon off a roof in a helicopter and deposits her on a posh hideaway on the north California coast. Her new client is T.J. Gordon, a "turnaround man" - that rare breed of corporate troubleshooter who creates profits and enemies while reviving failing companies. Gordon owns more than the helicopter that whisks Sharon away... much more. And he's not really "new." A friend from her radical student days in Berkeley, T.J. was a campus nomad with a lifestyle shadier than most. Now T.J. Gordon - grown ever more quirky, eccentric, and reclusive - is convinced someone is trying to kill him. He wants Sharon's help. Then he does another kind of turnaround: he vanishes. Hanging in the balance with T.J.'s life is his latest project, a visionary deal to revitalize an abandoned stretch of the San Francisco waterfront. His zigzag trail will lead Sharon both to Lost Hope, Nevada, a desert ghost town transformed into a booming tourist mecca with a mysterious long-buried corpse...and to Monora, a decaying Pennsylvania steel town where old resentments simmer beneath the grim shadow of empty mills. The clues are baffling and include a hermit in a hovel built of bottles and the saddened father of a missing union organizer. As the bizarre pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, Sharon is desperate to find T.J. - headed toward his deadly confrontation with his California dreams.

It's worth a $1 Million reward to Sharon McCone if she catches the man called the Diplo-bomber, who has set off bombs at consulates all over the U.S. Now he's in San Francisco—and that's McCone's turf. When he misses his latest target, the embassy of a small Arab emirate, McCone's on the spot—and soon discovers some disturbing things about this strange, forbidding embassy. One is the American woman kept a virtual prisoner there by her Arab mother-in-law. The other is a mischievous, lonely nine-year-old girl who's in grave danger not only from the terrorist but also from her estranged playboy father. Went the child disappears, McCone follows her trail to a desolate Caribbean island. Here McCone's rescue mission takes her dangerously close to death and the hidden motive behind the Diplo-bomber's explosions. Now, with a child's life hanging in the balance, what McCone plans to do may either be called cold-blooded murder...or justice.

The contemporary female private eye story began in 1977 when Edgar-nominee Marcia Muller published Edwin of the Iron Shoes, about Sharon McCone, investigator for the All Souls legal co-op. Sharon is a humane and sympathetic sleuth who makes a difference to her clients and to the world around her. The McCone Files contains the 13 previously uncollected short stories about McCone, including the Shamus Award winning "Final Resting Place", as well as two written specially for this volume.

Someone is bent on getting revenge on Ricky Savage, Sharon McCone's brother-in-law and a two-time Grammy Award-winning country singer. The danger escalates as Sharon realizes that more than one person has been playing underhanded games—and that the music industry is truly a broken promise land.

McCone's flying instructor Matty asks for help when her lover goes missing. Then, during an airshow, Matty's plane suddenly crashes. Convinced this is not an accident, McCone follows a trail of leads, and confronts the man who ordered Matty's death.

With her agency going great guns, Sharon McCone is known as one of the best detectives in the business...until her reputation is threatened by an impostor. The woman's resemblance to McCone is uncanny. Her knowledge of McCone's life is chilling. And with lover Hy Ripinsky away on business, McCone is alone as the double insidiously sabotages McCone's career, invades her home, and leads her into a deadly game of cat and mouse through San Francisco's underworld. Now, with professional detachment giving way to blinding rage, McCone is fighting for her life. But her very essence is also at stake...as a hunger for personal justice overrides her fiercely held ethics and lets loose a primeval urge for revenge.

ALOHA MURDER Accidents are plaguing a documentary film crew on breathtakingly beautiful Kauai. Can San Francisco P.I. Sharon McCone ferret out possible sabotage behind the scenes? The job sounds like a breeze—McCone envisions romantic, tropical nights with her lover, Hy Ripinsky. Instead, she finds a troubled paradise with rising tensions between native and non-native Hawaiians, a film going south fast, and a macabre ritual death. Then a mysterious local pilot rattles her commitment to Hy, and soon McCone is in danger herself...caught in the place Hawaiians call "ahi wela maka'u", the place between fire love and fire terror, the place where even a seasoned private eye can get burned.

Creator of the modern female private eye story, Marcia Muller has been writing novels and short stories about Sharon McCone since 1977. In the process McCone has gained a host of associates and formed her own detective agency. Some seven years ago, Marcia Muller decided to show readers different views of her sleuth by relating cases through the eyes of McCone's colleagues. McCone and Friends contains three stories told by McCone herself, as well as a novella and a short story narrated by the agency's investigator Rae Kelleher, a story from the viewpoint of its office manager Ted Smalley, an investigation conducted by McCone's nephew Mick Savage, and one by her long-term lover Hy Ripinsky. The settings range from small planes to a sweatshop which puts Asian women into virtual slavery, and the mysteries surround a 1950's jukebox in a rundown hotel, a sculpture welded together by a long-missing and now very-dead artist. In perhaps the most moving story of all, a teenage girl has vanished leaving as a clue only a collage on her wall. The McCone Files shows why Marcia Muller is one of the greatest mystery writers of our generation.

For PI Sharon McCone, when one door opens, another shuts. In the midst of celebrating a joyous wedding, she gets word that her father has died. The news leads her to the rituals of death: the scattering of ashes, the sharing of grief, the sorting of a loved one's belongings. But the last of these acts leads to a shocking discovery that will flip her life upside down. Soon, McCone is drawn into a conspiracy that includes the attempted murder of an activist lawyer and threats on her own life. No one is talking, and to discover the truth, Sharon McCone must learn to listen to the silence—before a killer's bullet silences her.

Sharon McCone has decided to throw herself into work so she can get past her brother's suicide, but the wrongful-death suit she is working on hits too close to home. It's a civil case in which the family of a young 'zine employee claims his suicide was the result of his company's treatment of him. In his final journal entry, Roger Nagasawa describes his fatal plunge from the San Francisco Bridge as being "swept away from sadness." With the help of her friend, J.D. Smith, McCone investigates the InSite offices and soon learns of its publisher's less-than-professional activities. She also learns that Roger had been afraid for his life since he was a witness to computer espionage. Faced with the death of her friend, Smith, and the sudden disappearance of Roger's associate, McCone must keep one step ahead of the game and solve this mystery—or else become the next victim.

Marcia Muller's beloved heroine Sharon McCone is back to investigate a personal betrayal by one of her operatives that has put her business and reputation on the line. The future's looking bright for Sharon McCone and the staff of McCone Investigations-until one of the firm's operatives, Julia Rafael, is arrested for major credit card fraud. A former juvenile delinquent, Julia was a risky hire, but by all accounts had been turning her life around. Banking on her innocence, Sharon goes to work looking for the real thief-only to discover a cache of illegal merchandise stashed in Julia's apartment. Is it the damning evidence that will seal her employee's fate, or the key to a larger conspiracy? Sharon must find out the truth....or lose her firm and reputation in the process.

In the latest installment in this critically acclaimed series, Sharon McCone is hired to investigate one of San Luis Obispo County's most puzzling cold cases. A generation ago, Laurel Greenwood, a housewife and artist, inexplicably vanished, leaving her young daughter alone. Now, new evidence suggests that the missing woman may have led a strange double life. But before McCone can penetrate the tangled mystery, she must first solve a second disappearance—that of her client, the now grown daughter of Laurel Greenwood. The case, which forces Sharon to explore the darker sides of two marriages, comes uncomfortably close on the heels of her own marriage to Hy Ripinsky, and she begins to doubt the wisdom of her impulsive trip to the Reno wedding chapel.

Sharon McCone is hired by her husband's security firm to track down "the ever-running man," a shadowy figure who has been leaving explosive devices at their various offices. She doesn't have to search for long. When McCone narrowly escapes an explosion at the security firm's San Francisco offices, she catches a glimpse of his retreating figure. The ever-running man is dangerously close—and anyone connected to the firm seems to be within his deadly range. To complicate matters, McCone is forced to question her intensely private husband, Hy, about his involvement in some of the firm's dark secrets. The history of corruption may jeopardize their marriage, but uncovering the secrets of the firm may be the only way she can save her husband's life, and her own.

Traumatized by a recent life-or-death investigation, Sharon McCone flees to her ranch in California 's high desert country to contemplate her future. Deep depression shadows her days and nights, and a chance encounter with a troubled, highly secretive Native American woman begins to haunt her dreams. Even though she is determined not to investigate anything during her stay—and perhaps not ever again—McCone is drawn into the plight of the young woman and her dysfunctional family. A murder and traces of violence at a deserted resort lead her across the desert and into Nevada , and finally to a remote and isolated ranch, where danger lies closer that she expects and where her future and life itself may hang in the balance.

Shot in the head by an unknown assailant, San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone finds herself trapped by locked-in syndrome: almost total paralysis but an alert, conscious mind. Since the late-night attack occurred at her agency's offices, the natural conclusion was that it was connected to one of the firm's cases. As Sharon lies in her hospital bed, furiously trying to break out of her body's prison and discover her attacker's identity, all the members of her agency fan out to find the reason why she was assaulted. Meanwhile, Sharon becomes a locked-in detective, evaluating the clues from her staff's separate investigations and discovering unsettling truths that could put her life in jeopardy again. As the case draws to a surprising and even shocking conclusion, Sharon's husband, Hy, must decide whether or not to surrender to his own violent past and exact fatal vengeance when the person responsible is identified.

San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone struggles to regain control over her body after she was shot in the head and suffered from locking-in syndrome. But when Sharon's friend from physical therapy goes missing, she must call upon those closest to her to find out the truth behind the disappearance.

Private eye Sharon McCone receives an e-mail asking for help from her emotionally disturbed half brother Darcy Blackhawk. She replies . . . but gets no response. As Sharon digs deeper, she discovers that Darcy sent his message from an Internet café in San Francisco, a city he's never been to before. Sensing that her brother is in terrible danger, Sharon begins a search for him throughout the city. The investigation leads her to the body of a woman at the Palace of Fine Arts, where a witness had told her that Darcy was headed. Then, as she digs deeper, Sharon uncovers a connection to the unsolved murder of a young heiress to a multimillion-dollar banking fortune. Now Sharon must race to solve both murders and ensure her brother's safety, despite the imminent danger that lurks within her own family.

Sharon McCone is excited—and relieved—to move her detective agency into the perfect new office space. Unfortunately, real estate woes aren't the only headache that the new building brings into Sharon's life. Possible nineteenth century ghosts and a shady "intra-reality organization" ensure that Sharon's new office will bring as much excitement as any of her clients. Approx. 7000 words.

Three years ago, Caro Warrick was acquitted for the murder of her best friend Amelia Bettencourt, but the lingering doubts of everyone around Caro are affecting her life. Sharon McCone is confident that she can succeed where other detectives have failed (though at times it's hard to shake her own misgivings about what happened), but when Caro is brutally beaten right at Sharon's doorstep, the investigation takes on a whole new course. How many more people remain at risk until Amelia's murderer is finally caught?

When new clients Jay and Camilla Givens come to Sharon McCone with Camilla's stories of devil worshippers performing human sacrifices in San Francisco, the detective is skeptical, to say the least. However, when she discovers that Jay is involved with the treasure hunting group The Night Searchers, she starts looking into what exactly he and the other participants are up to after dark. As she digs deeper into the Searchers, Sharon joins their ranks in order to find out more-while someone is searching for her.

A Short Story by New York Times Best-Selling Author Marcia Muller “Merrill-Go-Round” is McCone’s first recorded short case—a private-eye story that is also a “woman’s story,” in the best sense of that term. Excerpt I CLUNG to the metal pole as the man in the red coat and straw hat pushed the lever forward. The blue pig with the bedraggled whisk-broom tail on which I sat moved upward to the strains of "And the Band Played On." As the carousel picked up speed, the pig rose and fell with a rocking motion and the faces of the bystanders became a blur.

From New York Times bestselling author Marcia Muller, a new short story featuring her beloved private investigator, Sharon McCone.

New York Times bestselling author, Marcia Muller, brings you another thrilling mystery with her famous private investigator, Sharon McCone. 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 with a desire to rid a derelict house he's just bought in the city's notorious Western Addition neighborhood from intruders, drug users, and thugs. However, the abandoned house holds its share of secrets, and soon Sharon is contending with more than a simple eyesore as she searches for the individual who is obsessed with destroying her life....

Private investigator Sharon McCone returns in the newest mystery in Marcia Muller's New York Times bestselling series.A knock on the door in the middle of the night. It can only be bad news, and it is: Sharon's father Elwood has been the victim of a vicious, racially-motivated attack. A nationally recognized Shoshone Indian artist, he'd been visiting Sharon for the holidays, browsing for gifts in San Francisco's exclusive Marina district when he was set upon by a mob of angry young men. Now, Elwood lies in a coma, hovering between life and death. With little progress on the investigation from the overworked, short-handed police, Sharon resolves to track down Elwood's attackers and bring them to justice herself. But when Sharon starts receiving hate-filled, racist threats, it's clear that Elwood's attackers aren't planning to come quietly...

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 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 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

Private Investigator Sharon McCone goes undercover to investigate the murders of two Indigenous women in remote Northern California in this gripping, atmospheric mystery in the New York Times bestselling series. When the bodies of two Indigenous women are found in the wilderness of northern California, it is only the latest horrific development in a string of similar crimes in the area. Despite all evidence to the contrary, officials rule the deaths isolated incidents, which soon join the ranks of countless other unsolved cases quickly dismissed by law enforcement. In a town where too many injustices are tolerated or brushed under the rug, only a few people remain who refuse to let a killer walk free. But Private Investigator Sharon McCone is one of those few. She is hired by an organization called Crimes against Indigenous Sisters to go undercover in Meruk County—a community rife with secrets, lies, and corruption—to expose the truth. In an isolated cabin in the freezing, treacherous woods, McCone must work quickly to unravel a mystery that is rooted in profound evil—before she becomes the killer’s next target.

In this twisting mystery in a New York Times bestselling series, pranks escalate into a deadly scheme that Private Investigator Sharon McCone must unravel—​before they claim her life. San Francisco is home to more than 200 privately owned streets. Most are alleyways, but a select few look torn straight from the pages of a magazine. Lined with mansions and elaborate gardens, the properties are luxurious and perfectly maintained; security guards patrol the grounds to keep the curious at bay. Few know of these exclusive enclaves, but those who do prowl for availability, ready to make a grab for the precious real estate if opportunity strikes. When several such streets are targeted in a series of so-called pranks, Sharon is hired by a coalition of concerned owners to investigate. But as things escalate—an attempt on Sharon’s life, an explosion at a meth lab, and a shocking murder—Sharon realizes far more is at play than a few misdemeanors gone wrong. The case takes a sudden turn when one of McCone & Ripinsky’s most trusted employees is implicated, and Sharon will have to dig deep to save her agency—and her life.