2006 mystery, twenty-third in Muller's series about Sharon McCone,
private investigator in San Francisco. Over twenty years ago, a woman
vanished; a few days later, the investigation seemed to lose all
impetus. Now, after the death of her husband, their daughter wants to
try again to find out what happened.
The husband became withdrawn after Laurel vanished; now he's died
without revealing anything, and the older daughter has become
increasingly obsessed with the incident. And by a tenuous connection,
Sharon and her agency are the ones to catch the job.
Sharon's agency has expanded; she may be the face of it that gets in
the news (and indeed is the primary investigator in these stories) but
it's clearly a going and growing concern, and other employees help
both by taking more routine matters and by throwing in extra bits of
specialised research. Considering that the series has remained set in
real time since Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977, this is an entirely
reasonable thing to have happened, and I like the way that the cases
Sharon takes and the way she deals with them have shifted through her
career.
The exact timing of events is important here, and becomes more so as
the case goes on. The case gets off to a slow start, but that's
because there's progress on other fronts: Sharon is now married to Hy
(and has a new anxiety), her birth family and adoptive family meet
each other for the first time at the reception, and so on. But soon
enough Sharon's off to interview surviving witnesses, and someone
takes a shot at her. (They don't know her very well, do they?) While
that's happening, the daughter herself goes missing, and there's
something just a bit hinky about her husband too…
It's clear from the start that this situation is unlikely to lead to a
happy ending: either the mother, Laurel, chose to abandon her family,
or she was kidnapped, or she died in such a way that the body was
never found. Muller doesn't pull punches: although everything is
ultimately resolved and all the answers are known, it's a bit of a
downbeat ending, which feels right for this particular situation.
I've run off the end of the audio books with which I started this
series, but I'm continuing to enjoy them in text.