A Hard Light: A Maggie Macgowen Mystery

While I am an avid mystery reader, with emphasis on female writers, I had never heard of Wendy Hornsby or her Maggie McGowen series until recently - having read one, I found all the others and read those too! The Maggie McGowen series is one of the best I have read and I enjoyed each book. A Hard Light centers on a missing shipment of Vietnamese art and the now refugee Vietnamese curators, one an acquaintence of Maggie, who were responsible for shipping the art out during the final days of the South Vietnamese government. Documentary film maker, Maggie McGowen, is still between her San Francisco house and her LAPD detective, Mike Flint, who is involved in a brutal murder-by-children case. A good read!

Maggie MacGowen is going through a mid-life crisis. Her teenage daughter Casey, a high school junior, has an offer to attend a dance academy in Boston. Her network television contract is about to expire and probably will not be renewed. To top it all off, her lover, Los Angeles police detective Mike Flint has a little more than three months to go before he retires. With all this going on, Maggie, who rents a home in the Los Angeles area, decides the time is right to sell the San Francisco house she still owns from her long ago marriage. ...... However, before she can sell the house, an old friend and former client to her ex-spouse Scott, VietNamese Khanh Nguyen, asks Maggie to locate an old acquaintance Minh Tam. However, Khanh is killed and Scott suddenly appears back in her life, desperately wanting to purchase her house. Adding to the troubles confronting Maggie since she placed her house on the market, someone is watching every move that she and Casey make. If the two of them are not extremely careful, actions from Maggie's past will catch up to her present and end her and/or Casey's future. ..... Wendy Hornsby gets better and better with each new novel she writes. Her latest Maggie MacGowen mystery, A HARD LIGHT, is an exciting who-done-it that adds much flavor to the series by interconnecting events from Maggie's past with her present lifestyle. If Ms. Hornsby gets any better, she going to become the leading writer of the genre. .....Harriet Klausner