Gloria Damasco Mysteries

Eulogy for a Brown Angel began a new chapter in the mystery genre with the creation of the first Chicana detective in American literature. Readers can discover, or rediscover, Lucha Corpi's dynamic detective Gloria Damasco in the classic novel that started it all. A Chicano Civil Rights March has been disrupted by the Los Angeles police, resulting in the gruesome death of a prominent reporter. The tear gas has barely settled when a small, defiled body is left on a street in Los Angeles. A feisty political activist finds the murdered child and begins an investigation that will lead her on a trail of international conspiracy and bloody vengeance. Before long, two other people are dead, and Gloria is determined to piece the mystery together, no matter how long the search may last. Adding to the mystery is Gloria Damasco's dark gift, a puzzling extra-sensory awareness that forces her to confront situations in which solutions demand more than reason and logic. Eulogy for a Brown Angel is a fast-paced and suspenseful novel, packed with an assortment of interesting characters. A member of the international writers' circle Sisters in Crime, Lucha Corpi brings the intrigue to a hard-hitting conclusion in the picturesque Wine Country of Northern California.

Cactus Blood is Lucha Corpi's second mystery novel featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco. During the seventies, a young Mexican woman is raped, then exposed to pesticide contamination. Five men and two women save her and help her put her life back together. Sixteen years later, one of the men who helped her is dead, and two others have disappeared. The investigation of their disappearance leads from the 1973 United Farmworkers Strike and Grape Boycott in the San Joaquín Valley, to an old Native American ghost dancing site in the Valley of the Moon. Historic settings, California panoramas and Hispanic culture texture this suspenseful search for a ritualistic assassin. Cactus Blood is the second installment in this ongoing mystery series which highlights women's initiative, courage and intelligence.

Was it a specter from the past, some Aztec revenant that had inspired the "Black Widow" to kill her husband? Or did these chilling murders have more to do with the rights of property and inheritance, and mere greed? In Lucha Corpi's third and final installment to the Gloria Damasco Detective Series, Black Widow's Wardrobe, the intrigue is high, the questions are many and the answers lie in the sleuthing skills of one woman. Who better than Gloria Damasco, that indomitable detective with a flair for clairvoyance, to unravel this intricate and pulsing plot, which winds its way from an exotic Day of the Dead celebration in San Francisco to the even more exotic sites and customs of Tepozotlán, an Indian village high in the mountains above Cuernavaca? Gloria soon finds herself in an uncanny struggle to rescue the soul of Licia, the Black Widow, who believes herself possessed by the spirit of La Malinche, the eternally condemned slayer of her mixed-blood offspring during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Part thriller, part exploration of myth and history, Black Widow's Wardrobe is a page-turner.

Chicana detective Gloria Damasco has a "dark gift," an extrasensory prescience that underscores her investigations and compels her to solve numerous cases. This time, the recurring vision haunting her dreams contains two pairs of dark eyes watching her in the night, a phantom horse and rider, and the voice of a woman pleading for help. But most disquieting of all is Gloria's sensation of being trapped underwater, unable to free herself, unable to breathe. When Gloria is asked to help the owners of the Oro Blanco winery in California's Shenandoah Valley, she finds herself on the road to the legendary Gold Country. She can't help but wonder if the ever-more persistent visions might foreshadow this new case that involves the theft of a family heirloom, a pair of antique diamond and emerald earrings rumored to have belonged to Mexico's Empress Carlota. Soon Gloria learns that there's more to the case than stolen jewelry. Mysterious accidents, threatening anonymous notes, the disappearance of a woman believed to be a saint, and a ghost horse thought to have belonged to notorious bandit Joaquín Murrieta are some of the pieces Gloria struggles to fit together. Corpi weaves the rich cultural history of California's Gold Country with a suspenseful mystery in this latest installment in the Gloria Damasco Mystery series.