The third gripping Augustus Riordan hard-boiled exploit (after 2002's Vulture Capital
) launches the very human hero into action when he stumbles on the fresh corpse of a teenage girl in a San Francisco alley after helping his cross-dressing friend and assistant, Chris Duckworth, avoid a beating. The plot thickens when Riordan, a jazz bassist and veteran PI, fields a request from a distraught Ellen Stockwell, wife of an East Palo Alto police lieutenant and mother of an 18-year-old art school student, Caroline, who has been missing for three weeks. With Lieutenant Stockwell on administrative leave, Mrs. Stockwell says Riordan is her last hope. The gumshoe's search for Caroline leads him to further gruesome discoveries and forces him into the sordid world of Internet sexual predators. Riordan's street smarts and witty asides will make him a familiar—and welcome—figure to fans of Robert Parker's Boston PI, Spenser. (Oct.)
