Marcia Muller

Wolf in the Shadows: A Sharon McCone Mystery

Marcia Muller

• 1994 Anthony-Novel winner
• 1994 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 1994 Shamus-Novel nominee
• Score: 22.44

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…

Listen to the Silence: A Sharon McCone Mystery

Marcia Muller

• 2001 Anthony-Novel nominee
• 2001 Shamus-Novel nominee
• Score: 12.51

For Sharon McCone, when one door opens, another shuts. In the midst of celebrating the joyous wedding of friends, she gets word that her father has suddenly died in San Diego. After making the sad journey home to help scatter his ashes, she also learns that her father quested that she, not any of her four brothers and sisters, be the one to sort through his personal effects. In a cardboard carton marked “Legal Papers,” McCone will discover why. A highly confidential document, long hidden, soon provokes a violent breach between McCone and her mother and sends McCone searching for the truth kept from her about the past. It’s a truth about four friends, a shattered love affair, and a violent murder. It’s a truth that no none wants her to find…

Now, from a reservation in Montana to locate Shoshone relatives to tracking down other kin at a sacred Indian lake in northern California, McCone will encounter old family secrets and modern disputes, an environmental lawyer in desperate trouble, and a ruthless developed who’s a bigot to boot. She will feel a widening reservoir of anger…

1001 Midnights: The Aficionado's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction

Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

• 1987 Macavity-Nonfiction winner
• Score: 10.37

Mystery readers everywhere will dellight in this compendium of their favorite literature.

Vanishing Point: A Sharon McCone Mystery

Marcia Muller

• 2007 Shamus-Novel nominee
• Score: 6.57

In the latest installment in this critically acclaimed series, McCone is hired to investigate one of San Luis Obispo Countys 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 disappearancethat 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.

Where Echoes Live: A Sharon McCone Mystery

Marcia Muller

• 1992 Shamus-Novel nominee
• Score: 6.42

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.

The Shape of Dread: A Sharon McCone Mystery

Marcia Muller

• 1990 Shamus-Novel nominee
• Score: 6.4

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.