While Other People Sleep (Sharon McCone Mysteries) - Hardcover

In the old days, Sharon McCone was a scrappy, idealistic investigator working out of a rambling old San Francisco Victorian that housed the All Souls legal collective. In the 1990s, All Souls is a conventionally successful law firm, and McCone is on her own. These days her profile is a lot higher, thanks to a People magazine article, and her digs, both personal and professional, are decidedly more upscale. But the price of fame is higher than she knows; somewhere there's a woman with Sharon's face, Sharon's name, and a supply of Sharon's business cards. The impersonator isn't just drumming up business on her own--she's sleeping with McCone's clients and then stealing from them, destroying the agency's reputation, and threatening Sharon's family and friends as well as her livelihood. The mystery woman may even have found a way to screw up Sharon's relationship with Hy Ripinsky, her long-time lover. What's certain is that she knows the most intimate details of McCone's private as well as public life, and that wherever Sharon goes, her impersonator has somehow managed to get there first. What seemed at first like an innocent case of heroine-worship turns decidedly deadly, especially since McCone has no clue as to the mystery woman's motives, plans, or identity.

Marcia Muller almost single-handedly invented the genre of female P.I.'s, and she's in top form here, capitalizing on McCone's vulnerabilities as well as her strengths in a tightly plotted mystery with a dramatic climax, strong characters, and solid characterization. In prior installments, both Muller and McCone had started to lose their edge a bit, but fans of longstanding will be delighted by this engrossing adventure. --Jane Adams

A DOUBLE NIGHTMAR94E

With her agency going great guns, Sharon McCone is known as one of the best detectives in the business...until her reputation is threatened by an impostor. The woman's resemblance to McCone is uncanny. Her knowledge of McCone's life is chilling. And with lover Hy Ripinsky away on business, McCone is alone as the double insidiously sabotages McCone's career, invades her home, and leads her into a deadly game of cat and mouse through San Francisco's underworld. Now, with professional detachment giving way to blinding rage, McCone is fighting for her life. But her very essence is also at stake...as a hunger for personal justice overrides her fiercely held ethics and lets loose a primeval urge for revenge.