THE MAN IN THE MICROWAVE OVEN

Theophania Bogart, a fugitive from British high society, finds that her second case takes her outside her circle of friends but not out of her embattled San Francisco neighborhood.

Who could possibly have wanted to shoot attorney Katrina Dermody to death as she sat in the Tesla she’d made sure everyone in Fabian Gardens knew about? Theo, who discovers her body, knows she can start with the fellow tenants who opposed predatory developer Amos Noble’s determined attempt to plant a condo in the neighborhood. Her suspicions intensify when she insinuates herself into Katrina’s office and emerges with a folder documenting the juicy secrets of every tenant from Sabina Talbot, the daughter of anti-condo demonstrators Guillermo and Ruth D’Allessio (child out of wedlock), to wine company owners Jesus and Luis Aguardo (sale of liquor to teen who drank himself to death) to Angela Lacerda (high school abortion) to Theo herself, a photographer who changed her name and fled the press when her father, a noted English portraitist, stabbed her mother to death. As if that weren’t a rich enough field, a visit from priest/spymaster Sergei Wolf alerts Theo to the existence of a venerable espionage organization spanning generations whose members include both her beloved grandfather Clement Pryce-Fitton and Katrina. Where will the complications end? Not even at the Acknowledgments, whose first line identifies a real-life mystery a good deal more lighthearted than the higher-stakes case Theo’s plunged into.

Colorful, bustling, and stuffed to the brim with endless complications and a throwaway killer.