Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
PI Sharon McCone's search for a missing friend leads to a cold case involving a serial killer. Trish and Jim Curley, former neighbors of McCone and currently vacationing in Costa Rica, ask McCone to check on their adult daughter, Chelle, who hasn't been answering their calls. At 23, Chelle rehabs properties, with her current project being the Breakers, a run-down building in southwest San Francisco that was once an elite social center before being converted to apartments. Chelle isn't to be found at the Breakers, where she's been living and working, or at her parents' house. But what McCone does find at the Breakers is a horrifying collage of mass murderers, including the Carver, who was never found after stabbing four men and carving his signature on their bodies seven years earlier; now he seems to be at work again. With the help of colleagues and friends, McCone doggedly tracks down leads, even when she suffers a painful personal loss in the midst of the case. In her thirty-fourth outing, McCone sometimes turns introspective, adding depth to her adventures in her beloved city. A prime Muller mystery.--Michele Leber Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Trekking to the southwest San Franciscobuilding being renovated by Chelle Curley, the out-of-touch daughter of old friends, private investigator Sharon McCone finds a hidden art gallery depicting various murder scenes, past and present. But no Chelle. Another gritty case from Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Muller.
