Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen moves to France ready to settle into a new job with a French television network and a new life with diplomat Jean-Paul Bernard. Maggie soon discovers that under the peaceful veneer of the leafy Paris suburb where she now lives, there are deep and troubling fissures. At first she is an object of curiosity, the woman taking the place of Jean-Paul's beloved, deceased wife. But as she is drawn into the search for a girl named Ophelia, and tries to stop the persecution of a Muslim immigrant boy, she is viewed by the town an interloper, the outsider. As Maggie tells an interviewer, sometimes an outsider can hold up a mirror that reveals what we have become blind to. But are her new neighbors willing to look into that mirror? She will learn that the human spirit has tremendous resilience—until it snaps. "Hornsby's winning 12th Maggie MacGowen mystery... is indeed filled with rue, along with love, hate, and loss. A solid plot, plenty of intrigue, and the...

Imagine your every move is being tracked by someone whose clear intention is to do you harm. Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen arrives at the Paris apartment she inherited from the mother she never knew, ready to begin a settled life with her fiancé, Jean-Paul Bernard. But a cryptic phone call from Jean-Paul, summoning her, begins a nightmare winter odyssey across Europe as they try to stay a step ahead of a predator who uses every electronic medium to stalk their every move. Clearly, someone wishes them harm. But who? And why? As they try to answer those questions, their unknown nemesis uses the internet to offer a reward for their capture, turning the pursuit into a crazy real-world video game with an infinite number of players and no rules.

When her TV series is abruptly canceled, investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen accepts a short-term contract to teach film production at a local community college and finds herself in the middle of an explosive power struggle. In an era of budget cuts, the community college President arouses faculty and student animosity with his expensive building program. When Maggie finds the college president hanging in the building’s stairwell, suspicion falls on her young friend Sly Miller. A world-class artist, his sculpture was supposed to be hanging in place of the body. That’s only the beginning of a twisty plot dealing with the aesthetics and business of art, a billion-dollar art-for-arms deal; political corruption and cronyism; and issues of art forgery and journalistic ethics, all capped off by a stunning denouement.

After making progressive documentary films for decades, Maggie MacGowen did not expect to fall in love with a Los Angeles cop. But Mike Trent, whom she met while investigating her sister’s shooting, is no Los Angeles Police Department stereotype. Tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy Bogart face, he inspires her to uproot herself and her daughter from San Francisco and move down to L.A. It takes only a week for their new life to collapse. Fifteen years ago, Mike had just made detective. His first homicide investigation was high profile—an off-duty cop shot during a hold-up—and there was pressure to get results. Though he claims the conviction was clean, police methods of 1979 do not look good in the light of post-Rodney King L.A. As the district attorney comes down on him, Maggie must choose between defending her lover and confronting the fact that he may not be as kind as she thought.

Maggie MacGowen, an investigative filmmaker, is in Normandy with a film crew to document the agricultural four seasons on her ancestral family farm. An accidentally excavated skull causes a social media sensation, dredging up psychic scars left by the wartime German Occupation. In their youth, Grand-mere and other villagers had cut the throats of an entire brutal Nazi platoon. Now the grim discovery prompts tourists, the soldiers' descendants, the mass media, and vulturelike war-memorabilia dealers to flock to the formerly quiet farm. Then a young woman is murdered....

Documentary filmmaker Maggie MacGowen accepts a legacy bequeathed to her by Mike Flint, her LA cop husband: Find Jesús Ramón, a boy who vanished from Mike’s police car ten years earlier. Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen has taken on many tough assignments over the years. However, when her husband, LA Detective Mike Flint, asks her to take a fresh look at a decade-old unsolved case of a boy who went missing, she isn’t sure that she’s up to the challenge. But how does one say no to a dead man? Maggie seeks information from anyone who has a connection: a spoiled cop, an ex-con taxi dancer, the dead youth’s gang set--the hookers, the cons, the addicts, the homeless and the hopeless--and the good and decent people among them who remain the foundation of a community always in transition, always under siege. The answers Maggie discovers aren’t what she expects, nor is the sometimes deadly opposition from all sides. But she finds strength from her own resilience...and an acceptance of Mike’s final decision.

When Maggie MacGowen was a girl, her sister Emily lived the life of a leftist radical on the run from the FBI. Twenty-two years after the FBI finally caught her, Emily lives in Los Angeles, a doctor at a free clinic that tends to the city's down and out. When one of her old radical buddies comes out of hiding and surrenders to the police, their long-ago crimes become front-page news. Emily calls Maggie, now a documentary filmmaker, and asks her to come visit. By the time Maggie arrives in Los Angeles, Emily is nearly dead. The bullet, delivered point-blank in broad daylight, sent Emily into a coma. It seems a random act of violence, but Maggie digs deeper. She finds dark secrets in her sister's past, and a conspiracy that won't end until all those who ask questions are silenced.

In Los Angeles making a documentary about upscale day cares, Maggie MacGowen visits MacArthur Park to get contrasting footage of the pubescent prostitutes that populate its dark corners. There she meets Pisces, a fourteen-year-old hooker with manners that don’t match her profession. As they bond over a plate of pastrami, Maggie talks her into spending the night in a shelter. But Pisces comes with baggage: a nine-year-old hoodlum named Sly. Maggie takes them both to a convent, where they are fed, bathed, and tucked into bed, just like normal children. The next day, Pisces is dead, her throat slashed by an unknown hand. The Los Angeles Police Department has little time for murdered hookers, so it falls to Maggie to find the killer. The keys to the case are the young girl’s manners, and the fact that she died with her virginity intact.

Just a few hours before she is murdered, a foreign stranger claims she is a close relative of investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen.It is a truism that it's a wise child who knows its father. The same can apply to a mother, since we must believe and take for granted as true what our family tells us about our own early years. But what if you remember places you've never been, speak a language you've never been taught? What if your nearest and dearest are all involved in a conspiracy to cover up your true origins? In The Paramour's Daughter, Maggie MacGowen is thrown into this parallel universe, trying to remember the ghosts of comfort, fear, or love from her earliest years. She must question everything she's ever known about herself and her life,and deal with a large cast of previously unknown blood relatives, some of whom may not have affectionate feelings for the little girl who vanished so long ago. Especially when large sums of euros are involved....Edgar-winner...

Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen learns the hard way that going home again can be deadly. While clearing out her deceased father's desk, Maggie discovers that he had locked away potential evidence in a brutal unsolved murder 30 years earlier. When she begins to ask questions of family and old friends, it emerges that there are people in that seemingly tranquil multi-ethnic Berkeley neighborhood who will go to lethal lengths to prevent the truth from coming out. With the help of her new love, Jean-Paul Bernard, Maggie uncovers secrets about the murdered Vietnamese mother of a good friend and learns how the crime affected—and continues to affect—the still close-knit neighborhood. The more she finds out, the greater the threat of violence becomes, not only for the long-time neighborhood residents, but even for Maggie herself.