About the Book
On a stormy October morning, Maya Chen — a Bay Area preservation architect home for the first time in thirty years — walks into the old Pemberton Opera House for what is supposed to be a consultation. She finds the town’s most prominent citizen dead at the foot of the staircase, a second set of wet footprints leading toward a door that should not be unlocked, and a small coastal community whose politest faces are the ones with the most to hide.
The Opera House Affair is the first book in the Sea Ranch Cozy Mysteries — a series for readers who love their mysteries with strong sense of place, smart amateur sleuths, warm found-family characters, and just enough teeth to keep the stakes real.
Maya is an architect by training, which means she sees a building the way most of us see a face. She is grieving a grandmother she still talks to. She has the steady, observant Deputy Tom Bradley as her unlikely partner in figuring out what happened on that lobby floor. And she has Rita Alvarez-Santos at the Sea Ranch Lodge — the lodge manager who feeds her caldo de pollo and refuses to let anyone face hard things alone.
The Pemberton Opera House has a basement that doesn’t appear on the original blueprints. The building was renovated in 1923. The building inspector who signed off bought a house in cash three weeks later. None of this would matter if Dr. Leonard Hartwell had simply fallen down the stairs.
He didn’t.
Why I Wrote This
Because between the heavier books on the other shelves, I needed somewhere quiet to write — a place where the worst that happens is one body and the best that happens is a really good cup of coffee in a wood-and-glass lodge above the Pacific. Sea Ranch gave me that. I hope it gives it to you too.