Where the Bodies Are Buried

HOW HOSTILE CAN A TAKEOVER GET? MURDER MOST CORPORATE!Oakland sleuth Jeri Howard is

the whole package: a traditional gumshoe

who’s no stranger to the all-night stakeout, the deft, disarming blow to the hand holding the gun, or the methodical examination of documents and official records – and secret hiding places – that leads to where all the bodies are buried in a supremely hostile takeover. Jeri’s newest client was poised to blow the whistle on a large food manufacturer just before he took a header out his fifth-floor apartment window. One catch – he hadn’t yet told her what it was about. Jeri’s already cashed his retainer check, and her heart goes out to the teenagers to whom he was The World’s Best Uncle – plus she’s pretty sure he had some assistance out the window, and the police agree. So she suits up, dusts off her formidable legal secretary skills, and goes undercover in the gray cubicles of his former office. The locally-owned business, built with painstaking care over decades and managed with integrity by the founder and then by his children, has become unstable and corrupt. Morale is through the floor, and the place is so squirmy with viperous corporate raiders it’s tough to know what rock to look under.

Jeri just needs to get them all in one room and let all the secrets slither out

in the kind of immensely satisfying corporate implosion that every cube farm resident fantasizes about—and every mystery reader loves. Every Jeri Howard mystery is a love letter to the vibrant San Francisco Bay Area. This one includes a bracing ferry boat trip that will re-invigorate the heart of every reader who left theirs in San Francisco.

Fans of hard-boiled women sleuths, corporate thrillers, and detective novels with a twist will love P.I. Jeri Howard. If you like Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, T.R. Ragan, Laura Lippman, and Alison Gaylin, take Jeri out for a test drive—she’s your kind of tough, take-no prisoners female detective.

A WORD FROM THE CRITICS:

“Nobody plots an investigation more meticulously than Dawson,

and she does a fine job of working in all the East Bay locales. Each conversation, each potential suspect, gives Jeri a tiny detail to follow up on, building one fact atop another.” –

Roberta Alexander, Contra Costa Times

“One reason I like Janet Dawson’s gal gumshoe, Jeri Howard, so much is that she likes her life…Jeri is not your standard malcontent, bourbon-guzzling private eye…As with the other novels in the Jeri Howard series, Where The Bodies Are Buried

salts its suspense with tart social commentary.”

-- Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post