The Maggie MacGowen Mysteries Series

After a brutal attack on her sister, Maggie MacGowen searches L.A. for the gunmanWhen Maggie MacGowen was a girl, her sister Emily lived the life of a leftist radical on the run from the FBI. Twenty-two years after the FBI finally caught her, Emily lives in Los Angeles, a doctor at a free clinic that tends to the city’s down and out. When one of her old radical buddies comes out of hiding and surrenders to the police, their long-ago crimes become front-page news. Emily calls Maggie, now a documentary filmmaker, and asks her to come visit. By the time Maggie arrives in Los Angeles, Emily is nearly dead. The bullet, delivered point-blank in broad daylight, sent Emily into a coma. It seems a random act of violence, but Maggie digs deeper. She finds dark secrets in her sister’s past, and a conspiracy that won’t end until all those who ask questions are silenced.

Maggie tries to unravel an art theft that began during the Vietnam WarDuring the chaotic last act of the Vietnam War, three people tried to preserve the art from the French colonial museum in Da Nang. As Viet Cong forces overwhelmed the South Vietnamese, Bao Ngo, Khanh Nguyen, and Minh Tam sped south, in trucks laden with all the treasures of eighteen hundred years of Vietnamese history. Although one truck disappeared, those three made it to Saigon just as the Americans pulled out. Minh and Khanh escaped on the last helicopter, Minh waving goodbye to Bao, the cousin he expected he would never see again. Decades later, Khanh is at home in Los Angeles when Bao reappears, gun in hand. He ransacks her house and disappears. Maggie MacGowen, documentary filmmaker, looks into the incident, interviewing Khanh and Minh, who disappear just after she turns off her camera. She presses on, determined to understand this decades-old mystery, no matter how dangerous the past might be.

Maggie looks into the decades-old murder of a controversial copA long time ago, Roy Frady was a perfect cop. Now he’s perfect fodder for one of Maggie MacGowen’s documentaries. Frady worked narcotics in the Seventy-seventh Street Division as part of a unit nicknamed the Four Horsemen. A merry band of iron-fisted brothers, they kept their district clean of drugs until a litany of brutality charges caused their downfall. Not long after, Roy Frady was found with a 9-mm slug in his skull. The case remained unsolved for two decades. One of the Four Horsemen was Mike Trent, who went on to become a homicide detective and the love of Maggie’s life. Through the years, Frady’s file never left his desk, and as he approaches retirement he vows to close the case. Maggie plans a documentary about Mike’s investigation, unaware that she and her camera will find things in his past that are too ugly to be known.

Maggie investigates the murder of a strange young streetwalkerIn Los Angeles making a documentary about upscale day cares, Maggie MacGowen visits MacArthur Park to get contrasting footage of the pubescent prostitutes that populate its dark corners. There she meets Pisces, a fourteen-year-old hooker with manners that don’t match her profession. As they bond over a plate of pastrami, Maggie talks her into spending the night in a shelter. But Pisces comes with baggage: a nine-year-old hoodlum named Sly. Maggie takes them both to a convent, where they are fed, bathed, and tucked into bed, just like normal children. The next day, Pisces is dead, her throat slashed by an unknown hand. The Los Angeles Police Department has little time for murdered hookers, so it falls to Maggie to find the killer. The keys to the case are the young girl’s manners, and the fact that she died with her virginity intact.

Maggie’s life is rocked by a mistake from her boyfriend’s pastAfter making progressive documentary films for decades, Maggie MacGowen did not expect to fall in love with a Los Angeles cop. But Mike Trent, whom she met while investigating her sister’s shooting, is no Los Angeles Police Department stereotype. Tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy Bogart face, he inspires her to uproot herself and her daughter from San Francisco and move down to L.A. It takes only a week for their new life to collapse. Fifteen years ago, Mike had just made detective. His first homicide investigation was high profile—an off-duty cop shot during a hold-up—and there was pressure to get results. Though he claims the conviction was clean, police methods of 1979 do not look good in the light of post-Rodney King L.A. As the district attorney comes down on him, Maggie must choose between defending her lover and confronting the fact that he may not be as kind as she thought.