The Plague of Thieves Affair (A Carpenter and Quincannon Mystery) - Hardcover

Marcia Muller is a New York Times bestselling author and creator of the critically acclaimed series starring private investigator Sharon McCone. With more than thirty-five novels to her credit, Muller has received the 2005 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award, a Ridley Award, an American Mystery Award, and the Anthony Award. She lives and writes in California with her husband, the crime novelist Bill Pronzini.

Bill Pronzini has been nominated for or won every prize offered to crime fiction writers, including the 2008 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It is no wonder, then, that Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine said of him: ''Complexity of characterization, puzzle, and theme support the case for Pronzini as the finest American detective novelist in current practice.'' He lives and writes in California with his wife, the crime novelist Marcia Muller.

One of the ongoing mysteries in Muller and Pronzini's entertaining 1890s-era San Francisco whodunits may be resolved in the series's fourth entry (after 2015's The Body Snatchers Affair). In previous volumes, PIs Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon encountered an eccentric claiming to be Sherlock Holmes. Roland Fairchild, an attorney from Chicago, retains Sabrina to track down the Holmes impersonator, whom he believes to be his cousin Charles, so that Charles's fitness to inherit the family fortune can be evaluated. She also also accepts the duty of guarding an exhibition of famous, and expensive, reticules. Meanwhile, John is on the trail of those responsible for the gruesome murder of a brew master who drowned in a vat of fermenting beer. One suspect apparently takes his own life behind locked doors, but John is convinced that a clever murderer pulled off the seemingly impossible crime. The antics of the man who may be Charles Fairchild add a light touch, although the solutions to the various crimes aren't the authors' most imaginative. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency. (Jan.)\n