Sam Slater Mystery

Mystery, romance and baseball in 1957 San Francisco. Sam Slater is a lifetime minor league baseball player for the San Francisco Seals. The Seals have just one more season left as San Francisco is about to become a major league city. Sam has come to the end of his baseball career and is going to join the private detective agency of his best friend. When Sam's partner inadvertently sees something he shouldn't have, he is brutally murdered. Sam must go it alone and try to find out why. Along the way he is swept off of his feet by a beautiful, Elvis-obsessed TWA stewardess named Amelia Ryan. Sam and Amelia try to unravel the mystery together. On dark and foggy San Francisco nights, trouble is lurking just around the next corner.

Private investigator Sam Slater is hired to find out why a rich, politically well-connected, San Francisco man, Arthur Bolender, suddenly ended his life by plunging off of the Golden Gate bridge. All those who know Arthur say unequivocally that he did not commit suicide. However, Bolender's body was found floating in San Francisco Bay and, his car was abandoned in the traffic lane of the bridge. Meanwhile, Sam's romance with glamorous TWA stewardess Amelia Ryan continues to blossom and deepen. She is now his secret fiancee. Amelia also eagerly helps Sam solve his cases when she's in town. The key to unraveling the mystery seems to be a strange old Victorian-style house. Bolender's widow, a rich, seductive socialite named Maggie Bolender, was not even aware that her husband owned the house. What is really going on behind the doors of the mysterious house? Finding the answers will plunge Sam and Amelia into a dangerous world of political intrigue in the exciting sequel to "Last of the Seals."

Author Greg Messel brings readers another spectacular mystery novel to sink their teeth into with San Francisco Secrets, the third installment of his Sam Slater series. Combining the intrigue of late 50s noir with the excitement of a jet-setting adventure, lovers of the detective genre will love San Francisco Secrets. As spring arrives in San Francisco in 1958, Sam Slater, the inimitable baseball-player-turned-private-eye is about to embark on his greatest investigation to date, one that will turn his entire world upside down. Setting the scene with the blackmail of a prominent physician, John O'Dell, the private investigator hired to expose the blackmailer has been murdered, and Sam has been asked to take the case. At the same time, Sam's TWA stewardess fiancée, Amelia, is being stalked all over the globe as a womanizing older pilot has set his sights on her. As she travels from New York to Paris, London to Rome, she is determined to help Sam while maneuvering her way out of the pilot's clutches. To complicate their lives even further, a mysterious woman from Sam's past reappears and tests the bonds of Amelia's relationship with Sam. As the mysteries pile up, the blackmailer gets closer, and Sam and Amelia's lives become more dangerous, the risks they take lead them on a deadly hunt in a race against time. After a shootout on Coit Tower and a terrifying ride down Telegraph Hill, Sam and Amelia realize that some people will do anything to keep their secrets hidden. A heart-pounding mystery that will have mystery lovers furiously flipping through pages to reach the shocking conclusion, San Francisco Secrets proves, once again, that Messel is truly a master of the genre.

As 1958 nears an end San Francisco is being terrorized by a man who calls himself the "Fog City Strangler," who preys on pretty young blonde women. The strangler announces each murder by sending a note and piece of the victim's clothing to the local newspapers. Angst mounts as the strangler continues to claim more victims. Private eye Sam Slater is worried that the Fog City Strangler may be eying his beautiful blonde wife, TWA stewardess Amelia Ryan. His anxiety is further fueled when TWA launches an advertising campaign with Amelia's picture on a series of billboards plastered all over the city. Sam fears the billboards may attract too much attention--the wrong kind of attention. Meanwhile, Sam and Amelia are hired to try to find the missing daughter of a wealthy dowager who fears she has lost her only child. The missing woman went for a walk with her dog on Stinson Beach, near San Francisco, and seemingly vanished into thin air. The woman's husband arrived at their beach house and found the dog running loose but there was no trace of his wife. The police are stumped in their investigation. As Sam and Amelia look into the disappearance of the woman on the beach they discover that nothing is as it seems at first glance. On a stormy night a shadowy figure sets fire to the beach house where the couple is staying--hoping to stop their investigation. Greg Messel's Fog City Strangler is a stand-alone thriller but is part of the Sam Slater Mystery Series--Last of the Seals, Deadly Plunge and San Francisco Secrets. Greg Messel grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in Edmonds, Washington on the Puget Sound with his wife, Carol. "Fog City Strangler" is his seventh novel and is the fourth in a new series of Sam Slater mystery novels. Greg has lived in Oregon, Washington, California, Wyoming and Utah and has always loved writing, including stints as a reporter, columnist and news editor for a daily newspaper.