Portia of the Pacific Historical Mysteries Series

The First Woman Attorney in California Fights the Patriarchy of the Nineteenth Century in this best-selling and award-winning series   Clara Shortridge Foltz faces a patriarchal nemesis in 1884 San Francisco. When a white prostitute is murdered and flayed down to a skeleton, Clara is hired by the Six Companies of Chinatown to defend the sixteen males who are swept-up by the Chinatown Squad.     This ragtag and corrupt group of sheriffs works for the mayor, Washington Bartlett. The mayor uses the nation's anti-Chinese sentiment in his quest to win the race for Governor of California.    Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar, must learn fast to become a detective in order to prove that her client, journalist George Kwong, is not the killer but was set-up by the mayor to take the fall. Along with Ah Toy, her trusted translator and best friend, she is instructed by the head of detectives, Captain Isaiah Lees.     Lees becomes enamored with Clara, who is having personal problems with sexual commitment, due to her first marriage with Jeremiah Foltz. He was a Union vet who deserted Clara and their five children for a younger woman.    Captain Lees has personal problems of his own, as he has devoted all his time fighting the corrupt politicians and the Chinatown Squad for twenty years, and has not even made time for female relations. Theirs is a very special kind of romance.

CLARA AND HER FAMILY MUST STOP A MESMERIZING MURDERER Women in 1886 San Francisco are killing their husbands. Attorney detective Clara Foltz uses an eighteen-year-old clairvoyant to track down the mysterious man using the powers of sexual magnetism and mesmerism to turn abused women into murderers. This becomes a family mystery, as Clara's two oldest children get involved. Clara's assistant, Ah Toy, must also enlist the help of her evil uncle, Little Pete, because he also uses his paranormal abilities to control his harem of prostitutes in Chinatown. Ah Toy learns how he does it and leads Clara and her family inside the dark, seamy side of how women are controlled for nefarious purposes. But the true confrontation comes when Clara joins together with her attorney friend, Laura de Force Gordon, to question witnesses who testified at the trial of Mrs. Rachel Wilson-Rafferty. They also pay a visit to the wife of the man who began the first Rosicrucian group in America, Dr. Paschal Beverly Randolph. They learn he taught sexual magnetism and the use of hashish and marijuana to help transfix his members in spiritual trances before they had sex with their partners. As the wealthy and abusive husbands are murdered by their wives all over the United States, Clara and her team begin to close in on a variety of suspects. The supernatural climax leads to a final confrontation and the solution to the mystery, inside the Winchester house in San Jose, but not without several twists in the action, which place Clara's daughter and son in immediate danger. This second, much-awaited mystery in the Portia of the Pacific series shows how women used Spiritualism in order to further their rights as women and wives. In this case, however, women once again become victims of a sexist predator who will risk everything to achieve his misogynistic goals.

The Stockton Insane Asylum Murder A Portia of the Pacific Best-Selling and Award-Winning Historical Mystery Volume 3   "Madness can be seen as an intuitive probing into true reality."–R. D. Laing   Women were, among others, misdiagnosed as insane by alienists in the 1800s. A female child has been institutionalized in 1887, but the aunt of this child comes to Clara Foltz to say she believes the child was admitted to the Stockton State Insane Asylum (the first such institution in California) because she knew about a murder that was committed on her wealthy parent's estate. Clara solicits the help of Elizabeth Packard, the crusading (real) activist who was committed in the 1860s by her husband.  It took Mrs. Packard three years to earn her freedom. Together with Ah Toy, they contrive a way to go undercover to gain admittance into the Women's Building at Stockton to find the child and determine what happened to have her institutionalized. Children were regularly institutionalized, as were the elderly and the feeble-minded. Five of these characters are readers who won a raffle held by the author.  They are suspect asylum patients inside the Stockton State Insane Asylum, the first public mental hospital in California.  The author worked with each of these readers using their photos, descriptions and "personal idiosyncrasies" to craft the characters used in his mystery.   BookLife Prize, 2018:  "A thrilling adventure, perfect for whodunit fans and historical fiction buffs."   Kirkus Review:  "An entertaining mix of fact, fiction, feminism, and the occult."  

An 1887 Handmaid Gets Her Revenge in This Best-Selling and Award-Winning Historical Legal Thriller and Mystery Series   Abraham Lincoln was shot inside Ford's Theater, Washington D.C. In 1887, the investigation team of attorney-detective Clara Shortridge Foltz visits the same theater, which has now been converted into an Army Medical Museum for tourists. But, the same mysterious "vibes" are circulating among the skulls, surgical instruments and garishly frightening scenes from the Civil War battlefield. Lincoln's ghost, it is rumored, is also wandering about. And below the creaky floors, there is a secret that cannot be revealed until the final act in this unique mystery and political satire.   "James Musgrave's The Angel's Trumpet is one of those rare historical mysteries that is both entirely plausible and yet truly original.   A richly researched adventure into the complex social web of Gilded Age Washington, featuring deeply-realized and re-imagined luminaries including actress Sarah Bernhardt and President and Mrs. Cleveland, the novel is also surprisingly modern in its sensibilities, a compelling romp into an earlier era's struggle with addiction and vice and secrecy and race relations, and, most of all, hidden sources of power.  You will read this book in one sitting--and you will be very glad that you did.  A meticulously-plotted gem from a master of the genre."   Jacob M. Appel, author of the Dundee International Book Award winner, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up.

When Abortion was Against the Law, Attorney Clara Foltz Confronts the Establishment   In the fifth mystery of the best-selling and award-winning Portia of the Pacific series, Attorney and Detective Clara Shortridge Foltz and her partner, Attorney Laura de Force Gordon, become involved in two trials.  One, an administrative case, Clara defends the accused, an abortifacient merchant, who is allegedly the incestuous father of a child by his sixteen-year-old daughter, who dies during an abortion attempt.    But since this is 1887, no criminal charges can be made on the father, so the San Francisco police go after the midwife, a Chinese-American who treated the deceased, a half-Navajo girl, with acupuncture.  Clara and Laura call in witnesses from the past, including a Medicine Man from the victim's mother's tribe in the Arizona Territory, the famous Claflin sisters, suffragists who live in England, and the State Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior.      The supernatural curse of the tribe's Skinwalker witches, in the form of a coyote, which allegedly can run on two legs like a man, and the strange practices of the Navaho Medicine man and his deaf assistant, cause this mystery to evolve into a much bigger conundrum than merely that of abortion.  The search for truth will end on the Navaho Nation's land, under less than ideal circumstances.