San Francisco police Homicide Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, and her friends Clair Washburn, Medical Examiner, Cindy Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter and Yuki the Assistant District Attorney are back. This time they have two very different crimes to solve.
The first is the brutal shooting and beating of “Bagman Jesus”, who seems to be a well liked homeless man devoted to helping his fellow unfortunates. The second is the mysterious serial murders of the wealthiest and most privileged of San Francisco society.
Naturally the upper management of the city want 100% of the focus on finding and stopping the murder of the upper crust of society. Lindsay is ordered to let the Bagman case go. No one really cares about another homeless man’s death anyway. Cindy latches onto the story of the Bagman and creates a warm human interest series of articles even getting her newspaper to offer a $25,000 reward to the person who provides information leading to the capture and conviction of the Bagman’s murderer. Lindsay and her partner are forced to pursue the Bagman case on their own time.
Meanwhile more of the rich are being murdered. But there is no evident cause of their deaths to be found by Claire in her autopsies. Their bodies are in pristine condition but they just stopped breathing. Lindsay and her partner are stymied until an old cop in charge of cold cases brings similar killings to their attention. The socialites killed back in 1982 had all been bitten by a very deadly snake. The venom attacks the nervous system and the victim just stops breathing in 4 to 6 hours. There is no residual chemical left in the bloodstream to be detected.
Lindsay tracks the killer down. It turns out to be a young lady who went to school with each of the victims. She was the illegitimate child of a wealthy computer software businessman who was sending her to the same elite school as the upper class daughters attended. But these upper crust children did not treat the young girl well at all. They made her their servant, calling her ‘Pet Girl’. These many years later ‘Pet Girl’ was tracking each of them down and doing them in with her snakes.
Success with the social serial killer was on thing. Success against the killer of Bagman Jesus was quite another. It turns out that Bagman was not a nice benevolent helper of homeless people after all. He was a dope dealer. He ran a meth lab and enslaved young girls into prostitution and drug dealing for him. The homeless had tried to get the cops to deal with Bagman but since it was not the side of the city that pays the bills the cops did nothing. So, the homeless community took care of Bagman. When Lindsay and her partner came to arrest the man they had finally tracked down as the killer they found that the entire community all claimed to have killed Bagman. It was an impossible case to try but maybe it was for the best. The community had solved its own problems and things were good.
This 8th in the series of “Women’s Murder Club” mysteries continues the great Patterson/Paetro tradition. I give it a 9 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
