Point Deception

Plenty of people saw the girl and her broken down Mercedes, parked on the hard shoulder of the highway, but no one stopped - except her murderer. Sheriff's deputy Rhoda Swift is one of the ones who drove by. Moreover her conscience is still troubled by the gruesome mass murders in nearby Cascada Canyon, 13 years ago, and the wounded child who died in her arms. Now the community of Signal Point is marked by violence again and Rhoda's role is at its heart. Marcia Muller's new murder mystery is a deft and gripping story of a town imprinted with horror and of lives driven askew because of past wrongs. Evoking murderous legacies in a wild corner of the US, she once again proves herself a doyenne of the genre.

A new Marcia Muller book is always cause for celebration, and in this brooding, melancholy thriller she introduces a compelling new heroine. Rhoda "Rho" Swift is a deputy sheriff in California's fictional Soledad County. She is still tormented by a 13-year-old multiple murder in Cascade Canyon, where two counterculture families and their children were slain by an unknown killer. And when the body of an unidentified woman washes up in the waters off nearby Point Deception and two other local women go missing, Rhoda fears that the anniversary of the Canyon murders has unleashed another killing spree. She's not alone. The scared, suspicious townspeople are wondering the same thing. They're also unhappy that Guy Newberry, a New York writer whose bestselling books have exposed the secrets of other small towns, has turned up in Soledad trying to ferret out theirs. But Rho and Guy have something in common besides trying to learn why trouble has come back to Point Deception: they're both running from their own demons, and even the attraction that's starting to grow between them can't change the past.

Muller's intricate plotting and strong narrative flow have won a dedicated fan base for her Sharon McCone series, and both qualities are on full display here. She's skilled at evoking the landscape and atmosphere of her native California, and even her minor characters (like Wayne Gilardi, Rho's fellow cop, and Jack Swift, her father) are complex and interesting enough that their sketched-in back stories are worth telling. A terrific read from a master of the genre, Point Deception is Muller at her best. --Jane Adams