The Cheshire Cat's Eye by Marcia Muller

Maybe a measure of this sort of writing is how many can I read back to back before I have to take a break. I am quite ready to start on another one of these. And I won't even have to buy it. I pulled her books off the shelf this afternoon. I have thirteen of the twenty-nine Sharon McCone books and three from the other two much shorter series. There are a few missing, on the other hand, we apparently quit buying them in 2000 or thereabouts, because the last one I have is the 1999 book. That leaves only five of the first twenty missing - since I only had one of the first three (which are on my Kindle) on paper. The reading won't be as easy, but it will be significantly cheaper!

I thought Sharon was moving! She still seems to be at the same address, although the apartment seems to be a bit upscaled since the last book. Maybe after her friend Linnea got through burning the furniture and barfing all over the place, Sharon was forced to replace some things. She did manage to get to bed with Lieutenant Marcus, though. The cat she inherited in the previous book is still a presence.

This one is about what I think is called gentrification. The old Victorians for which San Francisco is known are cycling to the top of the wheel again, after being chopped up into apartments. Unfortunately some of those who are dispossessed of their homes are less than happy. There is some nice explanation of the types of Victorian houses and some history of San Francisco. I had no idea that, in the effort to block the fires that were destroying the city after the great 1906 earthquake, they dynamited whole streets of some of the most luxurious homes. I guess I did know that it was not the earthquake directly that did so much damage but the fires from the broken gas mains, rather in the manner that it was not the hurricane itself that came so close to destroying New Orleans, but the storm surge that broke the levee and the subsequent flooding.

The title refers to a Tiffany lamp of a unique design, and the mystery turns on the misinterpretation of a phrase. There was some of that in something else that I read recently, but I can't remember which one it was, though ---