A Jill Smith Mystery

In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America. With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome. For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah. Her ex wants a favor. His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing. Anne's ransacked apartment - complete with blood-sprayed walls - gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder. Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker. But her best suspect is her ex: the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons.

After six months of perfect weather, the people of Berkeley, California, have forgotten how to drive during a thunderstorm. Newly christened homicide detective Jill Smith is on her way home to a chocolate ice cream dinner when she gets caught in a traffic jam at the city’s only roundabout. At the front of the line, she sees the trouble: a flipped-over Cadillac and one dead driver. The man behind the wheel was one of the city’s leading citizens, a philanthropist in a town that puts charity first.

A town as diverse as Berkeley, California, is never without controversy. This year the uproar is over the Rainbow Village, a hippie-occupied bayside lot that has degenerated into a drug-infested cesspool. As the city tries to eject the squatters, two Grateful Dead fans are murdered and a developer is assaulted. But for homicide detective Jill Smith, the conflict at the Village is only a nuisance until the violence gets personal. While staking out a coffee shop, Jill sees Liz Goldenstern, a handicapped activist who has long been a thorn in the side of local business.

Until the helicopter crash, Jill Smith never knew fear. A homicide detective in the leftist enclave of Berkeley, California, she has faced down her share of thugs, thieves, and killers, but since surviving the downed helicopter, her nerves have been shot. Unwilling to submit to her anxiety, she goes back to work. The chef and owner of Paradise, an upscale restaurant in Berkeley’s so-called “Gourmet Ghetto,” is found on the floor of his own kitchen, poisoned by the soup he was seasoning.

Although the citizens of Berkeley are famously tolerant, that progressive attitude disappears at the property line between the homes of Dr. Hasbrouck Diamond and Leila Sandoval. In the Berkeley hills , there are no worse neighbors than Diamond and Sandoval. What began as a tiff about garbage cans and street parking has exploded into full-blown war, drawing in the city, the press, and now—to the irritation of detective Jill Smith—the police department.

When Philip Drem, the most feared and hated IRS auditor, is murdered, junk food junkie Jill Smith finds a long list of suspects among Berkeley's eclectic community.

Two witnesses see the man drag the old woman into a canyon while brandishing a rifle. As night falls, detective Jill Smith and the Berkeley police department set up a perimeter. The canyon is a hostage negotiator’s nightmare - dark, rough, and full of escape routes - and when she finally opens communication, the gunman doesn’t respond. Rather than wait for dawn, Jill leads her team into the darkness. At the bottom of the canyon they find a battered old mannequin and a box of stolen parking tickets.

Berkeley cop Jill Smith is back in another adventure that could only occur in this brazen, eccentric town. Gym owner and former Olympic diver Bryn Wiley is in a turf war with sixties radical Sam Johnson, who owns a competing gym. When Bryn is shot, Sam is a prime suspect. Throughout her investigation into the naked truth, Jill is sidetracked by a band of nude citizens protesting the citys new anti-nudity ordinance.

In Berkeley, people don't just disagree; they make careers out of it. And in a city where anything goes, where burned-out '60s hippies haunt the shadows along Telegraph Avenue, no one can outrun the past. Now police detective Jill Smith is plunged into a case that's pure Berkeley: a tangled tale of sins and retribution that has led to one man's disappearance, and another man's murder.