Edgar Award Winner Julie Smith, shows an Agatha Christie-like capacity for making much ado about clues, concocting straw hypotheses, and surprising us, in the end. Smith’s crisp storytelling, and her likable, unpredictable heroine will make readers look forward to more. Enjoy!

Other People’s Skeletons:An Action-Packed San FranciscoMystery; Rebecca Schwartz #5 (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)
Julie Smith
3.5 Stars (36 Reviews)
Genre: Metaphysical | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

What she’s about to learn will rock her world!

Rebecca Schwartz, “Jewish feminist lawyer,” as she’s fond of saying, thought she knew her best friend–and her boy friend. Not to mention her family. But everything’s about to change.

Secrets spill out of these pages like hornets out of a nest, each with its own distinct sting, as author Smith weaves a thrill-packed and complicated mystery that’s as much about how little we know about our nearest and dearest as it is about whodunit.

Rebecca’s shocked when Chris Nicholson, her glamorous law partner, is arrested for murder–but not nearly so shocked as when she discovers Chris can’t come up with an alibi. What she was doing, Chris says, involves a secret so damaging she’d be drummed out of San Francisco legal circles if anyone knew. All she’ll say is what her secret isn’t–crime, drugs, sex, alcohol, addiction, illness (mental or otherwise), or an eating disorder. So what’s left? Sure enough, when Rebecca uncovers it, her world tilts on its axis—and continues to list, ever more dangerously, as the story picks up speed and this formerly rational lawyer finds her worldview threatened by things she never knew existed. At least not in her circle! And Chris is far from the only one with a skeleton in her closet.

The murdered man, Jason McKendrick, was a much-loved columnist, a carefree bachelor with a million glamorous women, who also happened to have a very special friend who slept on a filthy mattress in his apartment. As Rebecca and Chris peel back the layers of Jason’s complicated world, they find he was leading not just a double life, but maybe many more. Only one person knows what made him tick. But can she stay alive long enough to tell his story?

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Death Turns A Trick : A Romantic and Humorous San Francisco Cozy (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery Series Book 1) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)
Julie Smith
4.3 Stars (46 Reviews)
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

The FIRST book in the Rebecca Schwartz mystery series by Edgar Award Winner Julie Smith.

A ROLLICKING TALE OF MURDER, ROMANCE, AND A BORDELLO…

Rebecca Schwartz, nice Jewish lawyer with a few too many fantasies, is happily playing the piano in a whorehouse when she suddenly finds herself assigned to make sure a near-naked state senator escapes a police raid. That dirty job done, a lovely evening turns even more delightful when she’s picked up by the cops and spends the next two hours at the Hall of Justice. Could this day get any worse? Of Course! Guess who arrives home to find a dead hooker on her living room floor!

Handsome Parker Phillips, Rebecca’s new beau and the most attractive man she’s met in ages, is arrested for the murder. (Worse, she suspects he might actually have done it.)

On the plus side, another very attractive man is following the case–reporter Rob Burns of the San Francisco Chronicle, a possible ally. And there are other possibilities.

Fans of Janet Evanovich, Stephanie Bond, and Elizabeth Peters will get a kick out of this one.

Excerpt:

Basically, I am the kind of girl that mothers wish their sons would marry. But nobody’s son did, and anyway I couldn’t be bothered. I was too busy living up to my father’s ambition for me. Or what I imagined it to be. He always said, “Be a doctor, Rebecca. There’s no money in law,” but anybody could see he was joking. When I was a little girl, he used to take me to watch him in court, and when I was a teenager, he’d discuss his cases with me. What did I know from doctors? I had a lawyer for a role model.

Now if you had led this kind of life and someone came along and said, “Listen, how would you like to play the piano in a whorehouse for just one night—you’ll be among friends; nothing can happen,” wouldn’t you do it? Especially if it were a feminist bordello? It wouldn’t have to be a case of getting back at your mom.

I should explain about Elena. She is a prostitute, and she’s also very close to being a madam, only she isn’t quite because this is a co-op bordello we’re talking about. It’s co-op because ostensibly everyone has an equal say in decision-making and the money is split among the members, but Elena is actually the brains and the driving force of the thing. She’d be a madam in the old-fashioned sense if she weren’t political.

I got to know her when she got busted and Jeannette von Phister asked me to take her case. Despite certain reservations I have about prostitution as a feminist issue (“horizontal hostility,” Jeannette calls it), I was already on the legal staff of HYENA, the “loose women’s organization” Jeannette had founded. As you no doubt know, HYENA is an acronym for “Head Your Ethics toward a New Age,” and its ultimate goal is to get prostitution legalized.

Sitting over crab salad and white wine in my gray flannel blazer and Cacharel blouse, I felt pretty naive as Elena spun tales about a world of crystal chandeliers and high-heeled sandals. A world where indulgence of personal vanity was not only not condemned but was actually applauded. I loved getting a peek at it.

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(also available from Amazon. CO.UK  IT  ES  CA )

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