Hiding Place

Investigating a grisly murder in the park, Lieutenant Hastings finds that the victim had some secrets of her own

San Francisco’s first murder of the year takes more than two weeks to come, but when it does, it’s ugly. June Towers is seventeen, a high school senior just six months from graduation, when the police find her dead in the park. She’s lovely, in the patchwork jeans and rainbow palette favored by the city’s youth, but her hair is matted with blood. Was the murderer a mugger, a rapist, a serial killer—or someone the young girl called a friend?

In search of answers, Lieutenant Frank Hastings digs into June’s past and finds that she was many things to many people. Her mother thought she was a good girl—a fine student with a future—but to a certain class of her peers, June Towers was something else altogether. Hastings has little time to come to grips with this strange personality before another good girl turns up dead.