'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune
With a brief note to her employer, Dorrie Mayo left her job - and another note taped to a neighbour's door claimed she was taking her baby to live with her in-laws on the other side of the U.S. A natural enough thing for a young widow with a fifteen-month-old daughter to do.
Only why didn't Dorrie tell any of her friends where she was going? And why were her notes typewritten when Dorrie didn't own a typewriter? For Maddox and his colleagues of the Wilcox Street precinct, this is a conundrum that will take all their skill and resources to solve.
In her 67 years, California author Elizabeth Linington wrote 82 crime fiction novels, under her own name as well as the aliases Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill and Dell Shannon. Her writing evolved from the early radio and stage dramas, via historical narratives, to her most celebrated novels - mysteries. She was nominated for Edgars in 1961, 1962 and 1963 for Case Pending, Nightmare and Knave of Hearts respectively. Her most successful creation, debonair LAPD Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, broke new ground in being one of the first Latino police officers in the procedural genre, and Linington herself was a pioneer in a male-dominated industry, earning the moniker 'Queen of the Procedurals'.