Welcome to Sea Ranch

A few honest things about the world of the Sea Ranch Cozy Mysteries.

If you’ve read The Opera House Affair, this page is the backstage tour. If you haven’t — you can read it without spoilers and decide if Sea Ranch is somewhere you’d like to spend more time.

Is Sea Ranch a real place?

Yes. Sea Ranch is a real coastal community on the Sonoma Coast in Northern California — about three hours up Highway 1 from San Francisco. It’s known for the architecture (Charles Moore and others), the redwood forests pressing right up against the Pacific, and a quiet civic culture that has been remarkably good at not turning into Carmel.

If you’ve never been, the photos do not do the fog justice. The fog is the main character.

Is the Pemberton Opera House real?

No — it’s a composite. Several real 1890s buildings on the Northern California coast contributed bones. Samuel Newsom did design the Carson Mansion in Eureka (that part is true). Whether he designed an opera house on the Sonoma Coast in 1893 is something I made up for the book.

Maya Chen

Maya is a preservation architect who grew up in San Francisco Chinatown, raised by her grandmother after she lost her parents at eight. She is grieving Nai Nai (her grandmother) throughout the first book. The architecture is real (Maya sees buildings the way most of us see faces). The grief is real. The grandmother’s caldo-de-pollo-style recipes are loosely Nai Nai’s; loosely also Rita’s.

Deputy Tom Bradley

Steady, observant, widower. Lost his wife Sarah to cancer three years before the book opens. Reads Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson. Has a golden retriever named Huckleberry — known to friends as Huck. Friends with Marco Santos (Rita’s grandson). Quietly woodworks in his garage. Don’t let the calm fool you; he doesn’t miss much.

Rita Alvarez-Santos and the Lodge

Rita runs the Sea Ranch Lodge. Born in Oaxaca. Widowed for two decades. Mother to several grown children, grandmother to Marco who works the lodge with her. Wears hand-knitted animal slippers. Has approximately forty aprons with sassy sayings. Will feed you and refuse to let you face hard things alone.

The food in the book is real

Rita’s caldo de pollo is her grandmother’s recipe from Oaxaca, with a small pinch of cayenne because chocolate and chicken soup should both have a little fire to chase the cold from your bones. Doris at Sweet Tooth Bakery makes the cinnamon rolls with cardamom — a Scandinavian thing she picked up from her own grandmother. The sourdough starter is named Herman. He is forty-five years old.

What’s next for the series

Book Two of the Sea Ranch Cozy Mysteries is in progress. Maya returns. Bradley returns. Rita and Marco and Huckleberry return. The new mystery is set in a different building on the Sonoma Coast — one that exists in real life — and I’m not telling you any more than that yet.

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