Janet LaPierre - Author of the Port Silva Mysteries

ort Silva, a fictional town on the chilly but scenic California north coast, was established like its real-life models in mid-19th century, supporting itself with lumber mills and a fishing fleet. When these industries faded more than a hundred years later—from overuse or overregulation, depending on your point of view—distance from urban areas and difficulty of terrain left such small towns few options for survival. Port Silva, a bit surly but tenacious, now makes its living from tourists, retirees, and as a setting for the mystery novels of Janet LaPierre.

LaPierre's Port Silva Mystery series began by focusing on schoolteacher Meg Halloran, her daughter, Katy, and police chief Vince Gutierrez. As the series progressed, additional Port Silva citizens stepped into, and out of, the limelight.

In 1999, the Port Silva Mysteries moved to Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co. with BABY MINE, in which Meg and Gutierrez find themselves involved in a murder connected with a fertility clinic. KEEPERS, in 2001, introduces Patience and Verity Mackellar, mother-and-daughter private investigators dba Patience Smith, Investigations, in a search for a woman and her 7-year-old daughter that takes the pair to California's isolated Lost Coast and a secretive commune where not all members exemplify Christian loving-kindness. KEEPERS was nominated for a Shamus Award. And in 2004's DEATH DUTIES, a childhood friend of Verity's returns to Port Silva and hires Patience Smith, Investigations to try to uncover the identity of the anonymous accusers who drove her beloved grandfather to his death thirty years earlier.

2006 brings the ninth Port Silva Mystery, FAMILY BUSINESS. In October of 2002, after the Port Silva City Council denies a group of citizens permission for a demonstration against the ever-more-likely war in Iraq, the organizers simply take their planning underground. A week later, some one thousand silent anti-war protesters march the city streets to a coastal park, where their peaceful demonstration degenerates into a riot that leaves policemen injured, jail cells full, one local man apparently lost in the stormy sea, and another simply missing. As Chief Vince Gutierrez struggles to protect angry citizens from each other and locate the missing man, Patience and Verity Mackellar are hired to look into the background of the man who presumably drowned, and find that he's not who he said he was.

FAMILY BUSINESS, DEATH DUTIES, KEEPERS and BABY MINE are available from Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co., from your local independent mystery bookseller, and amazon.com.