When bestselling mystery writer Marcia Muller teamed up with her husband, prize-winning author Bill Pronzini, to pen a Nick and Nora-style mystery series, they melded their unique approaches to whodunits with their own brand of storytelling. Pronzini’s action/noir approach plays well against Muller’s timeless sense of place in her beloved San Francisco.   

Now, in their third adventure, following THE BUGHOUSE AFFAIR and THE SPOOK LIGHTS AFFAIR, former Pinkerton operative Sabina Carpenter and ex-Secret Service agent John Quincannon are on the hunt in the late 1890s San Francisco setting in search of two body snatchings. While the events take place at virtually the same time, there seems to be no similarity to the method, opportunity or motive for the grisly crimes.

Quincannon finds himself searching through Chinatown’s opium dens for a client’s missing husband, reputedly a lawyer for one of the most notorious Tong leaders in the Chinese underworld, Bing Ah Kee. When it is discovered that Bing’s body is missing from his coffin, and the lawyer is shot and killed as Quincannon carries the drugged man from the notorious Cellar of Dreams, the subsequent events threaten to set off a bloody Tong war.

"Each character’s portrayal is written sequentially by each writer, which creates Pronzini’s humorous and action-oriented counterpoint to Muller’s more introspective approach."

Meanwhile, Carpenter has been hired to find the body of a socialite philanthropist millionaire by his widow when it is discovered that his corpse has been removed from a sealed crypt on the family estate. Could the two events be somehow related, as unlikely as that may seem? And why is the irritating presence of the man who insists he is the late Sherlock Holmes seen lurking about on the edges of both investigations?

Carpenter’s apparent budding romance with a prominent businessman who has a mysterious past has tongues wagging, which is especially irksome to Quincannon. She has made it all too clear that the detective agency is strictly a business arrangement, as she sternly repels any attempts by him to become more than just professional associates. Quincannon finds himself not only concerned for her well-being as he pokes into her swain’s past, but surprised to realize that he may be jealous as he unearths worrisome information.  

One of the pleasures in reading Muller’s San Francisco-based mysteries is enjoying the sense of that legendary city’s intriguing atmosphere and her dramatic portrayal of the time and place of the city she clearly loves. As the Sharon McCone mysteries evolved from the Haight-Ashbury wharf setting of the All Souls Detective Agency in the late 1960s to the high-tech, condo-dominated waterfront of today, her latest foray introduces us seductively to the foggy, faintly threatening and ribald dance halls and luxurious hotels of the same locale of over a century ago. We are delightfully immersed in one of the oft-times sinister, always seductive atmosphere of one of the most tantalizing metropolises in the world. 

Each character’s portrayal is written sequentially by each writer, which creates Pronzini’s humorous and action-oriented counterpoint to Muller’s more introspective approach. And thereby hangs a well-told tale.