Back Bay Investigation

A teenager returns home from school to find a gruesome scene: the apartment he shares with his mother in Boston's Chinatown has been ransacked, and she is dead. There is a bottle of Moutai, the most exotic and expensive Chinese liquor, left at the scene and traces of rat poison in one of the two shot glasses on the kitchen counter. This was evidently a homicide, but who could possibly be the killer?

In Beacon Hill, one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Boston, a wealthy widow dies in her sleep, while in Cambridge, where academia meets high tech, a dog is slaughtered. One death has seemingly no bearing on the other until the death in a remote Chinese village is announced.

The third in the series of The Back Bay Investigation, Death Comes to Lake Como takes place a few years after the events of Mystery of Moutai and The Fatal Sin of Love. It opens with Fang Chen and his new bride corresponding with their friend, Ann Lee, while on vacation in Italy. Things quickly turn sinister when a nurse for a wealthy American tourist and a retired cook are murdered.

The first time Jamie meets Jim, she is a graduate student, and he is a dashing young man embarking on a successful career in pharmaceutical research. They cultivate a mutual affection for each other while pursuing different goals in life. When Jamie meets Jim again years later, she has broken up with her long-time boyfriend, and he is having marital problems. A one-night stand in a remote hotel turns their friendship into a two-decade long love affair. When their liaison becomes too difficult to sustain, it brings a crisis to its head.

An elderly woman dies at the bottom of a stairway, and Betty is accused as her killer. Convinced that his sister isn't capable of such a crime, psychiatrist Seth enlists his friend Ann Lee, an amateur detective, and her partner to help clear her name. Never in their decade-long career have Ann and Fang Chen had to defend a client who already has airtight evidence and an eyewitness against her. As they try to separate the assumptions from the truth, every lead appears to be a dead end, and Betty Foreman seems to be guilty as accused.