Showing results by author "Susan Dunlap" in All Categories

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each year the Bohemian Club - a clique of powerful conservatives whose ranks include Nixon, Reagan, and Kissinger - gathers for a confidential meeting in the backwoods town of Henderson, California. Though their activities are shrouded in secrecy, Henderson meter-reader Vejay Haskell is about to get an all-too-close inside look. Searching the countryside for a coworker’s missing niece, she finds the beautiful gymnast lying dead in the bottom of a sewer drain.

As the dust settles on World War II, detective Lew Cassidy’s wife has come back from the dead. A German figure skater with a film-star face, she had returned to her home country when the war began to care for her ailing father; Cassidy later heard she died during an Allied bombing raid. But in the weeks after the German surrender, the US Army finds her in Bavaria, stricken with amnesia and married to Manfred Muller, an SS swashbuckler at the top of the army’s most-wanted list.

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.

This superb collection of nine detective stories focuses on the police procedural genre where crime investigation takes on a sense of reality.

Zen student and stunt double Darcy Lott wonders whether she can trust her own brother in this intriguing mystery. Darcy Lott is thrilled to be reunited with her brother Mike, who disappeared twenty years earlier. But her joy at bringing him home to San Francisco turns to fear when she learns that he has become the victim of escalating attacks—and he has no idea who is targeting him. Darcy determines to find out who is after him and why—before the attacks turn deadly.

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.