"We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship: how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only for her husband's fragile health but also for her son, who is afflicted with polio. Then, one Saturday morning, a stranger appears...

"Private eye Sharon McCone receives an email asking for help from her emotionally disturbed half-brother, Darcy Blackhawk, but he fails to reply to her response. As Sharon digs deeper, she discovers that Darcy sent his message from an Internet café in San Francisco, a city he's never been to before. Sensing that Darcy is in terrible danger, McCone begins a search for him throughout the city. The investigation leads her to the body of a woman at the...

Publicist Annabelle Starkey and classic movie fan Mickey Paxton find themselves being chased from Vegas to the San Francisco area by some bad cops, a nursing home resident where Annabelle's grandmother recently died, and a lawyer who volunteered at the home. When Annabelle's cat-sitting friend is killed at Annabelle's apartment, things get really dangerous!

After suffering personal calamities in New York, Mary Ann Singleton moves back to San Francisco after being gone for twenty years and begins to slowly rebuild her life, only to confront fresh terrors when her past comes back to haunt her.

While her undertaker husband practices the art of making victims of the untamed American West presentable and dignified after death, a woman devotes her time to safeguarding her marriage in the face of local challenges, a situation compromised when her husband is hired to disguise the suicide of a famous financier.

Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, lives on in this novel about growing older joyfully. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. This book follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist...

Nineteenth-century attorney Sarah Woolson is still trying to get her life together. Against her family's wishes, she opens her own San Francisco law firm, only to find that clients -paying clients, that is -are wary of allowing a woman to manage their legal affairs. Just when her patience, as well as her money, are about to run out, Sarah and her friend and former colleague, Robert Campbell, attend a séance at San Francisco's Cliff House. Making...

A novel about three remarkable families, the fifty-year old promise that once bound them together, the fiery betrayal that tore them apart, and the ancient bronze dragon that could destroy their future.

Description of Big Sur Jack Kerouac shot to literary fame in 1957 with the publication of his iconic book of the Beat Generation, On the Road. Kerouac was termed "King of the Beats," a mantle he was entirely uncomfortable with. Along with Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and several others forged a new literary voice and attitude — it was a movement that often mocked and challenged the American status quo....