Hailed as one of the greatest psychological mysteries ever written and winner of the 1956 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, Beast in View remains as freshly sinister today as the day it was first published. Thirty-year-old Helen Clarvoe is scared and all alone. The heiress of a small fortune, she is resented by her mother and, to a lesser degree, her brother. The only person who seemingly cares for her is the family's attorney, Paul Blackshear. A shut-in, Helen maintains her residence in upscale hotel downtown. But passive-aggressive resentment isn't the only thing hounding Helen Clarvoe. A string of bizarre and sometimes threatening prank phone calls has upended her spinster's routine. Increasingly threatened, she turns to a reluctant Mr. Blackshear to get to the bottom of these strange calls. Originally doubtful of their seriousness, Blackshear quickly realizes that he is in the midst of something far more nightmarish than he...

LUCILLE MORROW WAS A WOMAN TO BE ENVIED...In early middle life she retained the beauty of her youth; her husband was wealthy and completely devoted to her; she was the mistress of a large and charming home, properly staffed.Yet, in one unforgettable day, Lucille Morrow changed from a serene and self-possessed woman into a whimpering, fear-dominated creature glad to be shut up behind the iron gates of an asylum for the hopelessly insane.The only clue to what had caused her breakdown was a mysterious package delivered that morning. Who had sent it —and for what evil purpose —no one could say.

In this complex and psychologically acute critique of the post-war family a husband's paranoia concerning his young wife's fidelity escalates just as she struggles to survive while surrounded by his oppressive insecurity.Martha and Charles Pearson have been married for four years when Charles becomes convinced she is trying to poison him. Charles is desperately in love with his young, beautiful, and coolly removed wife, but he knows in his heart that she married him for his money. Martha, meanwhile, is miserable in the cage of her husband's psychotic paranoia. She struggles through her bland, textureless days, doing her best to care for him and to keep up appearances. When an embittered ex-boyfriend returns from four years away at war, a confrontation with him is all Martha needs to turn her life upside down. Experiment in Springtime is the poignantly observed story of an unfortunately entered marriage, a novel that scrapes away the veneer of domestic bliss to reveal...

An affair between the help and a club member is always looked at with suspicion at the prestigious Penguin Beach Club in Santa Barbara but when both go missing it's an outrage. Enter Tom Aragon, the droll Mexican-American lawyer turned private investigator, who finds himself navigating a viper's nest of California elites in his quest for the truth. Miranda Shaw and Grady Keaton should have made for a run-of-the-mill scandal at the prestigious Penguin Beach Club. Shaw, a recently widowed woman of fifty, was seen leaving the club with Keaton, a ruggedly handsome lifeguard half her age. When Miranda and Keaton go missing, the widower's lawyer sends his handiest man to find out where they've wandered off to. The clues come one stranger than the next for Tom Aragon in this often-hilarious novel of folly among the California elite.

Alibis are as scarce as murders prolific in this darkly funny locked-room mystery wherein a group of stranded winter sports enthusiasts must endure the harshness of winter, murder, and a handsome French-Canadian separatist.A bus filled with ski enthusiasts headed for a rustic chalet in Canada breaks down in the middle a blizzard, sending a mismatched group of strangers out into the night to find shelter from the storm. Shelter is found by way of a dilapidated country mansion replete with a crazy old woman and her caregiver, who "accidentally" shoots at the skiers as they approach. Unlike the would-be skiers, the inhospitable situation only goes downhill from there.

The quintessential Hollywood mystery novel—clever, humorous, and thoroughly Hitchcockian—a faded actress's death sows chaos among a quirky set of characters in the nervous hills of California. Rose's best days are behind her. No longer does she star on the silver screen, and her drinking and money troubles have eroded her wealth and societal status. Rose has no friends in the world except for a nosy landlord and her psychologist; her life is all but over. But authorities are still suspicious when she turns up dead in the garden of a wealthy doll manufacturer. Despite the coroner's finding of a natural death, a series of inquiries made, first by her ex-husband, then her psychologist, and eventually stir up enough doubts for the police to get involved. But involved in what?

A young girl is at risk in this tense and disturbing page-turner that reveals a web of abusers and victims among a disparate cast of middle class AmericansBen Gowen is trying to do the right thing. His brother Charlie is a disturbed man--one who has done his time for the crimes he committed, crimes involving children. But Ben is determined to help Charlie reform, something that isn't easy considering Charlie's limited mental capacity and the nature of his disease.Charlie wants to be good. To be good and to be liked by his brother Ben. He doesn't want to have the bad thoughts. But he's disturbed that the parents of a little girl named Jessie have allowed their daughter to engage in risky behavior. Climbing trees. Rough-housing on the playground. She could get hurt. She should be fed nourishing meals and given warm clothing to wear. Upset, Charlie writes an anonymous letter to Jessie's mother, shaming her. He will keep an eye on her and make sure she's...

California cultists, duplicitous damsels in distress, and dangerously high stakes conspire against Joe Quinn, a private eye who is beginnnig to feel more like a knight-errantJoe Quinn is cut adrift. He's lost everything. His girl. His job. His place in the universe. A security head for a casino in Reno just can't afford to have a gambling problem.Life takes a turn from tragic to strange when Quinn finds himself on the doorsteps of a religious cult's tower in the remote California hills. Quinn hitched a ride from Reno but never thought he'd end up in a place like this. But a gambler has to play the hand he's dealt. When one of the cultists asks Quinn to check on a man named Patrick O'Gorman and slides a not so small amount of money in his jacket, well, that's just the sort of hand Quinn has been looking for. Thing is, Quinn soon finds out, O'Gorman disappeared under bizarre circumstances several years ago. For reasons he doesn't entirely understand,...

A sincere and compassionate novel about the complications of married life, and the love, loathing, pain, loyalty, disappointments and friendship that grow out of a marriage Channel City, California, is a an average coastal town where everyone is doing their best to get by and be respectable, from the sun-grizzled fishermen on the wharf to the perfectly coifed society wives to the over-fed gophers who plague every middle-class garden. But in the hot summer of 1954, one unhappy man's extramarital affair turns the community on its head. Hazel Anderson, a dental assistant, is a contentedly divorced forty-something whose ex-husband, George, runs the town's wharf bar. Hazel worries about George, who is smitten with a much younger woman, Ruby, who won't have anything to do with him, and Hazel thinks Ruby is hiding secrets of her own. The dentist Hazel assists, Gordon Foster, works hard to support his wife and three children in their middle-class lifestyle, but he...

A deeply unsettling depiction of a mother who both resents her special needs child and covets the neighbor's young daughter.Millar gazes unflinchingly at the psychology of a deranged adult and their struggle to control their basest impulses. Suspenseful to the last, The Cannibal Heart could only be written by an author that was unafraid of asking the most unsettling of questions and peering into the darkest cravings of the human soul.

Santa Barbara in the 1960s was home to two of the 20th century's most important mystery writers, Margaret Millar and her husband, Ken (Ross Macdonald). It was also home to nearly 400 species of bird. This is the charming story of Ken and Maggie's quest to see them all. The addiction that is birdwatching comes to vivid life in Margaret Millar's delightful memoir of her early days as a naturalist. Part autobiography and part birdwatcher's journal, it is a moving elegy to a bygone place and time. Millar brings her meticulous plotting and no small amount of suspense to these charming stories of a belligerent brown towhee named Houdunit, a larcenous raven called Melanie, and a rat who carefully ferments his grapes before eating them, to name only a few. Ornithology was a passion for both Ken and Maggie and they devoted their lives to it with the same keen sense of detail and, in the case of Margaret, storytelling vigor as they brought to their writing. In this...

Mexican-American lawyer turned P.I., Tom Aragon, investigates the disappearance of Cleo Jasper, a young woman who is as beautiful as she is simple-minded. Her doting brother will stop at nothing to find his defenseless sister, but Aragon realizes that he has once again found himself in over his head when Cleo's friend turns up dead amidst a sea of somewhat dubious suicide notes. Tom Aragon receives a strange visit at his law office: a 22-year-old woman named Cleo Jasper, self-described as mentally retarded, comes in to ask him about her rights. The visit lasts fifteen minutes, then Cleo wanders off. Two days later, Tom Aragon is visited by a different Jasper: Cleo's older brother, Hilton, her legal guardian. Cleo has disappeared and Hilton Jasper wants to hire the lawyer to find her and bring her back. Has Cleo, a legal adult, taken stock of her "rights" and run away? Or did someone take advantage of the simple, suggestible young woman, and something more sinister is...

In this classic noir tale of blurred guilt and flawed innocence, a cynical lawyer uncovers the desperate lives of a group connected only by a gruesome murder. Eric Meecham is not an optimistic sort. An old-before-his-time lawyer, scratching out a living in courts and jail houses, he is no stranger to desperate cases and has little faith in anything or anyone. But his brand of existential nihilism isn't without curiosity, and when he gets a chance to represent a local society woman who's been arrested for murder under very scandalous circumstances, well, even he can't help but be engaged. Cold, austere, and used to having her way, Mrs. Hamilton is more than a little upset at having to travel 40 miles west of Detroit, in the dead of winter, to the small city of Arbana. But her careless daughter Virginia has landed herself in trouble again and Mrs. Hamilton will do anything to keep the family name out of a scandal. But she little understands the gravity of...

Introducing Tom Aragon, a fast-talking Mexican-American attorney turned private investigator, who is sent by his boss to track down a wealthy client's philandering ex-husband in Mexico. His boss' good idea of sending a Mexican to Mexico soon proves less than a sure thing as Aragon encounters crooked expats, land scams, and dead-end after dead-end in this quixotic and very entertaining homage to Chandler and Hammett. Gilda Decker needs a new bag, what with her second husband being suddenly crippled and her ex-husband hiding himself and his money somewhere in the hinterlands of Mexico. Gilda's recently retained lawyer, Tom Aragon, Mexican himself, is the best man for the job. But the deeper Aragon digs into her ex-husband's past the more dangerous his job becomes. One of Millar's few reoccurring characters and her only foray into the tradition of Chandler and Hammett, Tom Aragon, ranks among her best creations. A sarcastic but talented young lawyer with a few...