Showing results by author "Susan Dunlap" in All Categories

San Francisco stunt double Darcy Lott specializes in creating the illusion of serious danger. But when her lawyer brother calls and asks her to wine and dine a mysterious client, the danger is no illusion. Darcy takes an instant liking to the client, Karen Johnson, but there are too many unanswered questions. Karen claims to be getting a divorce, but Darcy’s brother Gary doesn’t handle divorces.

Set among the wistful Victorians of San Francisco, the second installment of the Darcy Lott series finds stuntwoman Darcy once again plagued by murder. Recently returned to San Francisco to assist her Zen teacher in his new zendo, Darcy cannot shake the pain of her brother's disappearance. When she spies him on the roof of the zendo, she hurries to catch him—and finds him gone.

After a terrifying stunt gone wrong leaves her plummeting into the tops of forest trees, a shaken Darcy Lott is dispatched by her Zen master to a remote monastery in California's redwood forest to face her worst fear—but also to deliver a message. This monastery has its own secrets. A student has disappeared and is feared dead.

Fred Astaire has a headache named Luna. The moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster, Luna has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood’s finest hoofer, and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets. But after two lessons with the lead-footed lady, Astaire tires of her making passes at him, and hires famously discreet private investigator Toby Peters to break the news gently. Trouble is, Luna and her boyfriend - nicknamed “Fingers” because he likes to cut them off - don’t take bad news well. To protect the star’s digits, Toby attempts to pass himself off as a dance instructor.

Berkeley cop Jill Smith is back in another adventure that could only occur in this brazen, eccentric town. Gym owner and former Olympic diver Bryn Wiley is in a turf war with sixties radical Sam Johnson, who owns a competing gym. When Bryn is shot, Sam is a prime suspect. Throughout her investigation into the naked truth, Jill is sidetracked by a band of nude citizens protesting the citys new anti-nudity ordinance.

It was part street theater, part civil disobedience, and pure Berkeley: Someone was waging guerrilla warfare on the city's meter maids and their beloved parking meters. But when the prankster took detective Jill Smith and her colleagues on a wild chase into a deep, overgrown ravine, the game led to murder. The dead woman was Madeleine Riordan.

In Berkeley, people don't just disagree; they make careers out of it. And in a city where anything goes, where burned-out 60s hippies haunt the shadows along Telegraph Avenue, no one can outrun the past. Now police detective Jill Smith is plunged into a case that's pure Berkeley: a tangled tale of sins and retribution that has led to one man's disappearance, and another man's murder. The missing man is Jill's friend, countercultural private eye Herman Ott, who always wears yellow and always offends.

Although the citizens of Berkeley are famously tolerant, that progressive attitude disappears at the property line between the homes of Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond and Leila Sandoval. In the Berkeley hills , there are no worse neighbors than Diamond and Sandoval. What began as a tiff about garbage cans and street parking has exploded into full-blown war, drawing in the city, the press, and now—to the irritation of detective Jill Smith—the police department.

A town as diverse as Berkeley, California, is never without controversy. This year the uproar is over the Rainbow Village, a hippie-occupied bayside lot that has degenerated into a drug-infested cesspool. As the city tries to eject the squatters, two Grateful Dead fans are murdered and a developer is assaulted. But for homicide detective Jill Smith, the conflict at the Village is only a nuisance until the violence gets personal.

Until the helicopter crash, Jill Smith never knew fear. A homicide detective in the leftist enclave of Berkeley, California, she has faced down her share of thugs, thieves, and killers, but since surviving the downed helicopter, her nerves have been shot. Unwilling to submit to her anxiety, she goes back to work. The chef and owner of Paradise, an upscale restaurant in Berkeley’s so-called “Gourmet Ghetto,” is found on the floor of his own kitchen, poisoned by the soup he was seasoning.

When Philip Drem, the most feared and hated IRS auditor, is murdered, junk food junkie Jill Smith finds a long list of suspects among Berkeley's eclectic community.

After six months of perfect weather, the people of Berkeley, California, have forgotten how to drive during a thunderstorm. Newly christened homicide detective Jill Smith is on her way home to a chocolate ice cream dinner when she gets caught in a traffic jam at the city’s only roundabout. At the front of the line, she sees the trouble: a flipped-over Cadillac and one dead driver. The man behind the wheel was one of the city’s leading citizens, a philanthropist in a town that puts charity first.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome. For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah. Her ex wants a favor. His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing. Anne's ransacked apartment - complete with blood-sprayed walls - gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder. Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker. But her best suspect is her ex: the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons.

In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America. With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan.

Herman Ott was the type of private detective that you could trust. He never talked to the police, except for that one time when Smith leaned on him….Now he was getting mysterious deliveries. Would solving the mystery cost him his career?

"I hadn't stepped with angels, but I was very aware that I died. I waited in the hall of judgement. Suddenly there was a door that I entered and found a festive banquet hall with the most magnificent buffet. I'm sure that I obeyed the Ten Commandments and will make it to heaven, especially if I get to enjoy all of this incredible food. The Ten Commandments, did I obey them?”

Jeremy saw his father shot when he was 7. He described the feeling as "the air was sucked out of his lungs." He became a pacifist, but would he feel that feeling again?

As the police officer, Jill Smith, arrived at the crime scene she asked the gentleman performing CPR on the victim what he saw. He said that he hadn't seen too much. Officer Smith's questioning revealed something different.

Beautiful, blond Liza Silvestri has put her bad-girl ways behind her and is living the California dream in a Malibu beach house with her adoring venture-capitalist husband, Jay - until gunfire erupts one evening at their L.A. loft. Liza doesn't dare call the police - she's got a secret in her past - and it turns out Jay has secrets of his own.

In the small woodsy town of Henderson, California, the electric company is strict about sick days. So when meter-reader Vejay Haskell decides to play hooky, her first concern is staying out of sight. She skirts around the edge of town, making her way to Frank’s Place, a cozy saloon owned by her friend Frank Goulet. After two cups of hot buttered rum, they have an argument and she storms out into the pouring rain. She goes home, takes a nap, and awakens sober, embarrassed, and ready to apologize. But by the time she gets back to Frank’s bar, he is dead.