California, Southern Humboldt County, 1985. Renata Drake steps off a Greyhound bus and into small-town Garberville, hoping to disappear. But she’s made a mistake. The FBI have the cannabis-producing “Emerald Triangle” town --- and its corrupt residents --- in their sights. Even worse, a teenage girl is missing. And when she turns up dead, the third in three years, it’s clear a serial killer is living among them. Renata knows about murdered girls and the burning desire for justice --- and for revenge. Her younger sister, Josie, is gone, and now so is the man who killed her. Renata didn’t stay in Washington, D.C. to be arrested for executing a murderer, and she shouldn’t stay here either. But Renata decides to investigate, and what she uncovers will trigger a final reckoning: For herself, for a killer, and for all of Southern Humboldt.

Miranda Corbie isn’t sure of anything at first except that Louise Crowley, the blonde who works as an assistant to Niles Alexander, is in trouble. Despite her own preparations for an imminent voyage to a blitzkrieged Britain and a painful farewell to the city she loves, Miranda decides to help Louise and takes on her last case as a private detective in San Francisco --- investigating her client, surveying the publishing world of 1940, and stumbling into murder with a trail that leads straight to Alcatraz…an island city of sharks. Along the way, Miranda explores her beloved San Francisco once more and discovers personal truths she has long denied.

Private investigator Miranda Corbie is asked to track a chemistry professor who is suspected of being a spy for the Nazis. Her journey into fear takes her on the famed City of San Francisco streamliner and to Reno, Nevada, the Biggest Little City in the World…where she finds herself framed for a murder she never anticipated. Forced to go underground, Miranda is determined to find the truth about a murder, a Nazi spy, and her own troubling past.

When Pandora Blake is murdered at San Francisco's 1940 World Fair and her body marked with an anti-Semitic slur, Miranda Corbie is soon entangled in a web of deceit and betrayal that is only overshadowed by the threat of impending war.