Invited by a reclusive mystery novelist to help draft his life story, a longtime correspondent and detective fiction expert finds herself in a real whodunnit when she learns the writer's first wife and son mysteriously vanished.

Lindsay Boxer has a beautiful baby daughter and a husband she loves unconditionally. She'd always been too focused on her career as a San Francisco police detective to wonder what domestic bliss might feel like, but now she knows, and she's never been happier. She can't imagine that a brutal murder at a luxury hotel, and the disappearance of a gorgeous blond woman from the scene, could have anything to do with her own life and marriage -- yet soon...

The undertaker's wife waits; she weaves; she builds. The undertaker practices his art, the Dismal Trade, with consummate skill. He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. Through it, he has managed to transform the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, tavern brawls, ambushes, fires, and every hazard in a raw West, these, in his hands, become presentable. Everywhere...

She'll stand up for her family, no matter the cost Former socialite Barbara Lavette is unconcerned about the gossip that surrounds her new marriage. However, her husband Bernie, a poor mechanic whom she met in the midst of World War II, is willing to do anything to prove his worth to her as well as the society that shuns him. Barbara will support her husband in any way she can, but when she becomes the victim of an attack by the Congressional Committee...

"22 seconds...until Lindsay Boxer loses her badge--or her life. SFPD Sergeant Lindsay Boxer has guns on her mind. There's buzz of a last-ditch shipment of drugs and weapons crossing the Mexican border ahead of new restrictive gun laws. Before Lindsay can act, her top informant tips her to a case that hits disturbingly close to home. Former cops. Professional hits. All with the same warning scrawled on their bodies: You talk, you die. Now it's Lindsay's...

"The story of a woman who must start a new life as an event planner in San Francisco after her fairy tale marriage falls apart"--Provided by the publisher.

San Franciscan goth girl Abby Normal and her brainiac boyfriend, Stephen "Foo Dog" Wong, pursue a vampire cat and his minions, but things become even more complicated with the arrival of three ancient vampires intent on getting some payback.