Some histories should stay lost. Especially those written in blood.

The only things Millie Lang's mother gave her were third-degree burns, and a name Millie refuses to use. Abandoned as an infant, Millie grew up as "the girl with the scars", shunted from one foster family to the next.

Before she met Lukas Strand, she'd never understood what "home" meant. Then Lukas disappeared without a word. Eight years later, Millie

For Larison, a man off the grid and on the run, the sleepy northern California town of Arcata, gateway to the state's fabled Lost Coast, seems like a perfect place to disappear for a while. But Arcata isn't nearly as sleepy as it seems, and when three locals decide Larison would make a perfect target for their twisted sport, Larison exacts a lifetime of vengeance in one explosive evening.

Marcia Muller is, as Sue Grafton pointed out, the creator of the modern female private eye story, and Sharon McCone is one of the finest and most sensitive of all current sleuths. Sharon came upon the scene in 1977 with Edwin of the Iron Shoes, the first of fifteen novels and fifteen short stories filled with cluing and caring. The McCone Files gathers all of Sharon's short cases into a single volume covering her entire career as staff investigator