The Night Searchers (A Sharon McCone Mystery, 30) - Hardcover

Marcia Muller has written many novels and short stories. She has won six Anthony Awards, a Shamus Award, and is also the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award (their highest accolade). She lives in northern California with her husband, mystery writer Bill Pronzini.

Sharon McCone, the private investigator in Marcia Muller's detective stories, solved her first case in 1977, so Muller is entitled to go crazy on an assignment that takes this sturdy series to the 30-book mark. She does something more daring by giving THE NIGHT SEARCHERS the clean, classic moves of her earliest novels. It's refreshing to watch her revered sleuth personally handle the low-tech job of following a rich young couple around town. McCone is investigating the wife's sightings of a cult of devil-worshipers supposedly offering human sacrifices in the nicer sections of San Francisco.

McCone was never a loner. She started out working for a co-op of legal aid lawyers, and she maintains a full staff of operatives at her own shop. But this time, she's not as involved with her husband's hush-hush overseas business, and her demanding extended family seems to be managing its domestic problems without her. McCone uses that freedom to infiltrate a vaguely sinister group of treasure hunters who prowl the city by night, searching for clues in places like Alamo Square and Aquatic Park and the Maritime Museum down by the bay. It's the perfect narrative structure for Muller, who is never better than when she's roaming the streets of the city she knows and loves so well.―New York Times Book Review

At the start of MWA Grand Master Muller's absorbing 32nd Sharon McCone mystery (after 2012's Looking for Yesterday), Jay and Camilla Givens, an attractive young couple who live in San Francisco's upscale Russian Hill neighborhood, come to the PI with a disturbing story. Camilla claims that one evening, while walking past a vacant lot, she saw people in hoods about to sacrifice an infant on "an outdoor fireplace, probably bought from Williams-Sonoma." Jay is skeptical of his wife's tale, as is McCone, who pegs Camilla as "an emotional defective." But she agrees to look into the matter, and soon discovers that Jay has ties to a shadowy treasure-hunting cult called the Night Searchers. Accompanied by her handsome nephew, computer whiz Mick Savage, McCone covertly joins the group for a harrowing night on the town. McCone's daring and smarts make her an irresistible heroine. The brisk narrative vividly evokes contemporary San Francisco.―Publishers Weekly

How time does fly! This is book number thirty-one in the Sharon McCone Mystery series, with a plot so imaginative that readers will have no choice but to sit down and settle in for an exciting read they will not forget...The action never slows down, as the two investigators and their employees find themselves dead center in the middle of a truly bizarre group of folks that the reader will never forget. This is a definite keeper!―Suspense Magazine