The Price of a Wicked Name

Frank DiSalvo read mysteries for thirty years. He didn't read the last one that killed him. When the retired accountant dies in the back room of Josie Bellwether's Berkeley bookstore, the police call it a heart attack and close the file in a week. Josie doesn't close books. She sells them. Then she finds what Frank was hiding inside one — a deposit slip from a bank that closed in 1994, a protection order under a name that isn't his, and a grandson on suspension from the homicide department who wants to know the same things she does. Twenty years of Bay Area crime is buried in a funeral home on Telegraph Avenue. And the man who buried it knows her name, her address, and exactly which book Frank left behind. She isn't a detective. She's just the only one still reading.