The Shape of Dread by Marcia Muller

I like having the title actually referenced in the text of the story and the reference in this book is worth a quote here. "It was the amorphous shape of dread - that chimera that, once glimpsed, forever waits implacably in the shadows." Nicely said, deserves reading aloud, besides how can you resist a sentence which includes the words "amorphous," "chimera," and "implacably." You just have to love it when a writer of series murder slips and lets you know that she has a real vocabulary.

Sharon is poking around in a two-year-old crime. A young comedienne has disappeared and is presumed murdered. A young black man, Bobby Foster, has been convicted and awarded the death penalty. But one of the All Souls attorneys has taken on his appeal and something just doesn't seem quite kosher, so he coaxes Sharon to look into things.

The first issue is the lack of a body. Is Tracy dead or not? Her mom says she is alive, her father says she is dead. Bobby says that she is dead or she wouldn't have let him be convicted, because he didn't do it. We get to waffle on that for quite a large chunk of the book. But, as is customary in this sort of thing, all is made clear in the end.

Reading these gets you a pretty good dose of history and geography of San Francisco. I think it would be more appealing if I actually knew the city. It is enough to make me think it is a place I might like to know as well as Muller clearly does.