Private investigator Kinsey Millhone puts herself in the gravest danger of her career when she is hired by the widow of Nota Lake detective Tom Newquist to discover what it was that had been bothering Tom in the last six weeks of his life before he died of a heart attack.

Nikki Fife, the wife of a hated divorce lawyer, out on parole after eight years in prison for killing her husband, hires ex-cop-turned-private detective Kinsey Millhone to find the real killer and clear her name.

Beverley Danziger looked into an expensive, carefully wrapped package from a good but conservative shop. Only her compulsive chatter hinted at nervousness beneath her cool surface. There was an absent sister. A will to be settled--a matter of only a few thousand dollars. And she didn't seem like someone longing for a family reunion. Business was slow and she needed to pay bills, so Millhone took what looked like a routine case. It turned tricky when...

Lonnie Kingman is in a bind. He's smack in the middle of assembling a civil suit, and the private investigator who was doing his pretrial legwork has just dropped dead of a heart attack. In a matter of weeks the court's statute of limitations will put paid to his case. Five years ago David Barney walked when a jury acquitted him of the murder of his rich wife, Isabelle. Now Kingman, acting as attorney for the dead woman's ex-husband and their child...

Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, the only child of an adoring father. Nord Lafferty was already in his fifties when Reba was born, and he could deny her nothing. Over the years, he quietly settled her many scrapes with the law, but he wasn't there for her when she was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the California Institute for Women. Now, at thirty-two, she is about to be paroled, having served twenty-two months of a four-year sentence....

Kinsey Millhone has been framed for a crime she didn't commit and must now uncover the truth or face losing everything she has worked for.

Fearing that the assailant who had once tried to kill him--and had left him badly scarred and partially amnesiac--would again try to murder him, Bobby Callahan turns to Kinsey Millhone for help.

A biography of mystery writer Kenneth Millar who wrote under the nom de plume of Ross Macdonald. He was the author of 18 novels featuring the California detective Lew Archer, a mystery series with a good dose of philosophy. Following a financially difficult youth in Canada, he took to writing to make money, competing against his wife, mystery writer Margaret Millar, who in the beginning was better known.