Hard-nosed beat cop Jill Smith combs Berkeley for a Buddhist guru-killing cultist
In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America.
With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan. As his disciples clap and cheer , Jill tries to keep from smirking. The guru finally draws her attention, however, when he slumps forward with a knife in his back. She calls for backup and cordons off the temple. Jill doesn’t care about karma, but she knows when justice is due.
“Susan Dunlap is one of the best of the new crop of mystery writers.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“As long as writers like Dunlap continue to play with the form, genre fans need not lament the mystery’s demise.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Ms. Dunlap takes an affectionate view of the iconoclastic artists, rebels and intellectual vagabonds who constitute Berkeley’s counterculture society and makes an honest effort to penetrate their colorful surfaces.” —The New York Times
