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Sharon McCone, the successful owner of McCone Investigations, is at the pinnacle of financial stability. She has remodeled a conference room, complimented her staff on their most recent successes, and promised to hire additional office help. But a frantic phone call to her private office turns her world upside down. The police are reading Miranda rights to one of McCone's operatives, Julia Rafael, and haul the girl off to jail. She is accused of major credit card fraud.
Stunned, McCone refuses to believe that Julia has committed the crime, despite her juvenile record. McCone's difficulties increase when her business is implicated by a search of the premises. A record of the ill-gotten merchandise is discovered in her firm's storeroom. Civil litigation will destroy her reputation.
Julia languishes in jail over a weekend. McCone sets out to vilify her employee and get to the heart of the matter. Political hopeful Alex Aguilar has brought the charges against Julia. McCone sneaks to the man's home address and interviews his neighbors. They speak of a quite different personality than the one he projects publicly. In addition, he has had a recent houseguest who elicits shudders from other tenants. Another peculiar twist lies in the death of a fund-raiser for Aguilar's Mission district business. When McCone delves further into Julia's case files, she finds a connection to criminal elements within the Mission district. Aguilar's name remains near the surface of the facts she has unearthed.
Marcia Muller's THE DANGEROUS HOUR, the 23rd Sharon McCone mystery, is tastefully written, with enough barely raw language to tempt, but not cloud, the text. McCone is a classy lady, with an outside-the-business love life to pursue. She has ignored her lover's proposal of marriage, with a promise to think about it and give him an answer soon. Business interferes with their romantic consideration. Marriage plans rest on the back burner.
Two shootings (McCone's employees the targets), illegal gun purchases, drug deals, and a dubious Hispanic man with the initials R.D., revolve back to the accused girl's distant and recent past history. McCone bulldogs the evidence, between curves and twists, to her eventual solution. But will the information exonerate Rafael and clear the clouds of suspicion surrounding her beloved firm? Muller rounds out the intricate plot with a return to her heroine's dubious future.
Wit abounds and characters become part of the reader's consciousness. We really care about what McCone discovers, and we get inside her emotional psyche throughout her quest for the truth. She is a woman to admire but is common enough in both her strengths and frailties to follow into the next Muller adventure.
--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad
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