Maggie MacGowen Mystery

When Maggie MacGowen was a girl, her sister Emily lived the life of a leftist radical on the run from the FBI. Twenty-two years after the FBI finally caught her, Emily lives in Los Angeles, a doctor at a free clinic that tends to the city's down and out. When one of her old radical buddies comes out of hiding and surrenders to the police, their long-ago crimes become front-page news. Emily calls Maggie, now a documentary filmmaker, and asks her to come visit. By the time Maggie arrives in Los Angeles, Emily is nearly dead. The bullet, delivered point blank in broad daylight, sent Emily into a coma. It seems a random act of violence, but Maggie digs deeper. She finds dark secrets in her sister's past, and a conspiracy that won't end until all those who ask questions are silenced.

In Los Angeles making a documentary about upscale daycares, Maggie MacGowen visits MacArthur Park to get complementary footage of the pubescent prostitutes that populate its dark corners. There she meets Pisces, a fourteen year-old hooker with manners that don't match her profession. As they bond over a plate of pastrami, Maggie talks her into spending the night in a shelter. But Pisces comes with baggage: a nine year-old hoodlum named Sly. Maggie takes them both to a convent, where they are fed, bathed and tucked into bed, just like normal children. The next morning, Pisces is dead, her throat slashed by an unknown hand. Maggie teams with LAPD detective and sometime-lover Mike Flint to find the killer. The keys to the case are the young girl's manners, and the fact that she died with her virginity intact. Not to mention the other bodies that just keep turning up. . . .

After decades making progressive documentary films, Maggie MacGowen did not expect to fall in love with a Los Angeles cop. But Mike Trent, whom she met while investigating her sister's shooting, is no LAPD stereotype. Tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy Bogart face, he inspires her to uproot herself and her daughter from San Francisco and move down to L. A. It takes only a week for their new life to collapse. Fifteen years ago, Mike had just made detective. His first homicide investigation was high profile--an off-duty cop shot during a hold-up--and there was pressure to get results. Though he claims the conviction was clean, police methods of 1979 do not look good in the light of post-Rodney King L. A. As the DA comes down on him, Maggie must choose between defending her lover and confronting the fact that he may not be the decent man she thought he was.

In 1974, Roy Frady was a perfect cop. Now he's perfect fodder for one of Maggie MacGowen's documentaries. Frady worked narcotics in the 77th Street Precinct as part of a unit nicknamed the Four Whoresmen, a bunch of hard-drinking, womanizing cops that included Maggie's current lover, homicide Detective Mike Flint. They were successful at shutting down the drug trade in their district until a series of brutality charges brought about their downfall. Soon after, Frady was found murdered in a burned out house, a 9-mm slug in his brain. The case, which remained unsolved for two decades, never left Flint's desk. But as Maggie interviews Frady's friends, sex partners, and police colleagues for her film, what she uncovers in the events of the past, including the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Front, threatens not only to stain the reputation of her lover, but to put her own life in danger.