"The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California-and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities within their walls. And now, just as the turmoil seems buried and the Estate prepares to move into a new future, construction work unearths a grim relic of the estate's history: a skull, hidden away some fifty years ago. Inspector...

It is New Year's Eve, 1952 in Los Angeles. Private Investigator, Aloysius Archer, is dining with his friend and rising Hollywood star, Liberty Callahan, when they're approached by Eleanor Lamb, a famous screenwriter, who would like to hire him as she suspects someone is trying to kill her.A visit to Lamb's Malibu residence leaves Archer in no doubt of foul play when he's knocked unconscious entering the property, there's a dead body in the hallway...

"Return to 1930s Burning Cove, California, the glamorous seaside playground for Hollywood stars, mobsters, spies, and a host of others who find more than they bargain for in this mysterious town. Maggie Lodge, assistant to the reclusive advice columnist known only as Dear Aunt Cornelia to her readers, hires down-but-not-quite-out private eye Sam Sage to help track down the person who is blackmailing her employer. Maggie and Sam are a mismatched pair....

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate-the first automobile any of them have seen-and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced...