It's 1941 and San Francisco is pulsing with excitement—with hot jazz, ice-cold cocktails, and the ever-present threat of war. For Cameron Ferris, newly arrived from Tiny Town, Oregon, a seat on the sidelines is thrilling enough, so she's delighted with her boring job as a file clerk in a warehouse. For a while. But now the while's up, and Cameron is starting to feel like one of life's wallflowers. For good or for ill, life is about to provide a cure, in the form of a strange man living in her apartment, kidnappers hanging out on the fire-escape, and all traces of her life scrubbed clean. Who is Cameron Ferris? Has she become so unspeakably dull that she simply disappeared? And what can an invisible person do to foil a gang of kidnappers? A highly unusual, thoroughly unnerving tale that sings with the music of the period.

This is Lenore Glen Offord's third mystery set in Northern California and featuring the amateur sleuthing team of Georgine and Todd McKinnon. It's 1949, and with the War well and truly in the past, Americans are relaxing into the warm bath of suburbia. Even groovy Northern California, even sharp-eyed Georgine and Todd McKinnon (last seen in The Glass Mask and Skeleton Key) have largely succumbed to the lure of comfortable conformity. But the McKinnons' pleasant domesticity is shattered by the arrival of a distinctly nonconformist young man, who arrives unannounced one night, tells a wild tale, and dies a short time later. Why did he choose the McKinnons to hear him out? Sure, he hoped Todd would write a check, eager to turn the strange story into one of the thrillers he regularly sells to the pulps. But could there have been another reason? One bizarre phone call, and Georgine is all too ready to believe there might have been...

The War is over, but only just, and San Francisco is still crammed with military uniforms. Of course, being San Francisco, it's also crammed with Bohemians (in a few years, they'll be known as Beatniks). Noel Bruce straddles both camps: By day she's a straight-laced driver for the Navy, but at night she lets her hair down and parties with her flamboyant art-school chums. The party comes to a screeching halt, however, when a dead body turns up in a sculptor's studio, and the artists discover that pretentious mannerisms and amusing facial hair provide little defense against the chill of fear. As in Skeleton Key, the heroine is a working woman, and, like all of Offord's novels, My True Love Lies provides an intriguing bridge between old-fashioned, 1930s-style plotting and a kind of feminism that feels startlingly up-to-date.

It's 1943 in Berkeley, CA. Georgine Wyeth, a young widow keeping house for herself and her young daughter, has stumbled upon what seems like a good gig, doing some typing for a local academic. Working late one night she gets caught in a blackout, only to trip over the body of an air-raid warden. A simple accident? Or something more sinister? And could Georgine's work for that scientific gentleman somehow have put her in jeopardy?