"The Filbert Steps"

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Vivian Salvatore came back to Telegraph Hill with a cat, a settlement, and a book she cannot seem to write. Fifty-two years old and newly divorced, she has rebuilt her life around the most beautiful staircase in San Francisco: a window table at the corner espresso bar, the old families on their three corners, two hundred wooden steps walked twice a day. Then, on a bright October morning, she finds the city's most ambitious developer dead on the third landing. The police are ready to call it a fall. But Vivian spent twenty-seven years reading teenagers' faces for a living, and she has been reading her neighborhood for longer: the coat buttoned wrong, the cigarette ground out on the landing, the storefronts quietly sold to a post-office box in Delaware, and the people she loves, every one of whom had a reason. A warm, sharp, fair-play mystery about who owns a neighborhood and who merely holds it, The Filbert Steps introduces Vivian Salvatore: a sleuth who notices everything and forgives almost as much. Perfect for readers who like their mysteries with a strong sense of place, a community worth returning to, and a moral question under the plot. The first Telegraph Hill Mystery. Includes recipes from the Caruso family deli, a walker's map of North Beach, and a Telegraph Hill playlist.