Coming Back by Marcia Muller

Started: 2 August 2012
Finished: 3 August 2012
Pages: 292

Marcia Muller completes the big three of contemporary women mystery authors.   Muller started writing in the late 70s though, so Sharon McCone has been detecting for a few years longer than either Kinsey Milhone or V.I. Warshawski.  Muller has also evolved McCone's life far more than the others:  once a loner working as the house investigator for a legal cooperative, McCone now married and runs a high end investigative agency staffed by ex-FBI and ex-cops.

From a practical point of view, Muller herself is running a business.  She writes books that she feels appeal to the zeitgeist -- late 70s San Francisco, the heroine has ties to Berkeley and social justice.  The social justice element faded through the 80s and into the 90s.  Late 90s, some of her clients became high tech businesses.  By the 2000s she'd struck out to found her own agency.  By the 2010s,  she's wealthy and married to a guy who owns a rather frightening security business with ties to the CIA.

I think that's why I have never loved McCone.  The mysteries are always solid, the plots fast-paced, the San Francisco background interesting, and the cast of secondary characters always evolving.   But I always feel a little bit like I'm being sold something.

That being said, there's nothing particularly wrong with this one.  It was kind of interesting to have the story told as a series of vignettes by the various members of her team.  The story moved along, and wasn't too implausible most of the time (although seriously, you aren't going to report the abduction to the police?  Or those corpses you find along the way? And how is it you were able to convince the social workers to give you custody of that abandoned 13 year old you found along the way?)  And it let me unwind when I needed to unwind.  So, mission accomplished.