cover image Emma Chizzit and the Napa Nemesis

Emma Chizzit and the Napa Nemesis

Mary Bowen Hall. Walker & Company, $19.95 (164pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-3211-8

The doughty, eponymous senior citizen sleuth nearly comes to grief in her third case (after Emma Chizzit and the Sacramento Stalker ). Rumors of the existence of a previously unknown Robert Louis Stevenson manuscript intrigue Emma, who runs a salvage company, and her friend, Frannie Edmundson, especially since the manuscript may be hidden in the Napa Valley, where they both grew up. Taking up the hunt, Emma and friends--including Frannie's beau, PR man Mike Channing, and Emma's would-be suitor, retired cop Vince Valenti--find they have been preceded everywhere by millionaire twins Mannie and Morrie Wulff, also from Napa and notorious for playing practical jokes on each other. After a drawing of a naked Mannie disappears from an art show and then the man himself goes missing, no one raises a cry. Then Emma learns that the artist is gone, having won a trip to Hawaii, and that her alcoholic mother has died under circumstances that suggest murder. Closing in on the missing parts--man and manuscript--Emma encounters real trouble. Hall's civilized, opinionated and fiercely independent sleuth brings a refreshing, down-to-earth approach to life and crime. (May)