OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile
It’s always tough for a narrator to take over a long-running series. Happily, Elizabeth Evans proves herself a success with her second Muller title, the 34th Sharon McCone mystery. It’s a solid enough listen, with McCone trying to track down Chelle, a young friend who has disappeared from the house she is rehabbing, a house in which there is a whole wall dedicated to serial killers.The Breakers is an abandoned former nightclub and hotel in the San Francisco Outlands. Then Chelle's parents disappear while traveling in Costa Rica. Evans has some enjoyable characters to showcase, and this series evokes San Francisco like no other. While the plot itself is forgettable, Evans’s narration is exemplary,. C.A.T. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
06/25/2018
In MWA Grand Master Muller’s underwhelming 35th novel featuring San Francisco PI Sharon McCone (after 2017’s The Color of Fear), McCone is dismayed to learn that 23-year-old Chelle Curley, a daughter of friends who restores old buildings, has disappeared from the Breakers, a former nightclub that Chelle was renovating to turn into a service center for disabled veterans. Interviews with Chelle’s friends lead nowhere, but McCone is intrigued that the nook where Chelle was camping out in the Breakers was next to a wall covered with news clippings about killers such as Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson. The case gets even weirder when Zack Kaplan, one of the building’s tenant’s acquaintances, asks McCone to come over right away; disturbingly, Zack is nowhere to be found, but the PI finds a note in Chelle’s handwriting, stating, “I’ve got a right to disappear.” Developments in McCone’s personal life don’t add much, and the solution will strike some as so improbable as to undercut the notion that her investigative work is realistic. Muller has done better. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"One of the world's premier mystery writers."—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Her stories crackle like few others on the mystery landscape."—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
"A prime Muller mystery."—Booklist
"The Night Searchers [has] the clean, classic moves of her earliest novels...[Muller] is never better than when she's roaming the streets of the city she knows and loves so well."—New York Times Book Review on The Night Searchers
"Absorbing...McCone's daring and smarts make her an irresistible heroine. The brisk narrative vividly evokes contemporary San Francisco."—Publishers Weekly on The Night Searchers
"A plot so imaginative that readers will have no choice but to sit down and settle in for an exciting read they will not forget...The action never slows down, as the two investigators and their employees find themselves dead center in the middle of a truly bizarre group of folks that the reader will never forget. This is a definite keeper!"—Suspense Magazine on The Night Searchers
"Muller has displayed a knack both for keeping the series fresh and for allowing her character to grow..., Muller's series remains a gold standard for female detective stories."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review on Locked In
"Muller has created a delicious mixture of adventure, action, altruism, pathos with a touch of humor, and romance thrown in to build a massive base of loyal fans . . . She is one of those rare series authors who never lets her characters grow stale or trite."—BookReporter.com
"Muller undoubtedly remains one of today's best mystery writers."—Associated Press
Kirkus Reviews
2018-07-02
Sharon McCone's search for the missing daughter of a pair of old friends leads her to a flurry of crimes old and new.From their vacation in far-off Costa Rica, Trish and Jim Curley reach out to McCone when their daughter, Michelle, already a successful real estate rehabber at 23, stops answering her phone. It's true, says Zack Kaplan, one of the two remaining tenants in the Breakers, Chelle's current project: He hasn't seen her for a week. Having dismissed Damon Delahanty, the ex-con boyfriend working with her on the Breakers, Chelle has been down to two other helpers, Al Majewski and Ollie Morse, and one other tenant, self-avowed wizard Tyler Pincus, who seems incapable of kidnapping or killing the woman who was trying to evict him. The most disturbing piece of evidence left behind, a "wall of horrors" in Chelle's stripped-down bedroom that displays newspaper clippings of celebrated Bay Area murderers, has been there ever since an earlier tenant, aspiring true-crime writer Bruno Storch, posted the clippings there years ago. But it's one of those items, the one featuring a shadowy figure called the Carver who's still at large after killing half a dozen men, that provides the crucial connection when Zack is stabbed to death in a vacant lot in Outer Richmond. Fans may feel that the mystery of Zack's death and Chelle's disappearance is upstaged by another season of The Sharon McCone Show, with updates on every recurring character from McCone's Shoshone birth father, Elwood Farmer, now finally recovered from his brutal beating by white supremacists (The Color of Fear, 2017), to her free-spirited adoptive mother, Katie McCone, to her husband and partner, Hy Ripinsky, to her favorite operatives and more distant relatives.Though it works against suspense and urgency, the emphasis on the regular cast pays off this time in a truly traumatic development you can bet Muller will be exploring in further detail in her next installment.
