Marcia Muller: The Cavalier in White (1993)

From the Publisher:
"A stylishly written mystery... enough dangerous escapes for anyone's taste." -- Houston Chronicle
A Masterpiece Of Crime
Frans Hals's painting The Cavalier in White disappears from a San Francisco gallery. Art security expert Joanna Stark returns from self-imposed retirement to solve the crime from a building she had made burglarproof. But art theft leads to murder, friends become strangers and the past stalks the present. Especially when Joanna's nemesis -- a brilliant art thief whose ice-blue eyes haunt her dreams -- becomes the most dangerous and perplexing piece in a puzzle that gets closer to home every minute.

"Refreshingly not hard-boiled." -- USA Today
"A satisfying climax with enough left unresolved to promise more adventures in the future." -- Publishers Weekly

Marcia Muller: The Cavalier in White. Worldwide Publ., ISBN: 0373833040 (August, 1993), 252 p., $3.99.

Marcia Muller: The Cavalier in White (1986)

From the Publisher:
Joanna Stark thought she had finally left her troubled past behind: After the death of her husband, she quit the San Francisco art security firm where she was a partner and retreated to the small California wine country town of Sonoma.

But unexpectedly, in one rainy week before Thanksgiving, her carefully constructed world collapses. A Frans Hals painting, The Cavalier in White, is stolen from the M.H. de Young Museum, and the strange circumstances surrounding its disappearance prompt her former business partner to ask her to return to the city and investigate the theft. Joanna knows she must go back -- as much for her own protection as for the sake of the museum.

Her investigation takes her from the hushed corridors of the de Young to a seedy waterfront tavern; from a Seacliff mansion to a vandalized shack on the shores of the Bay; to galleries, museum openings -- and the scene of a murder.

By the time she confronts the killer, the careful order of her life is nearly destroyed and she finds that the past is not only inescapable, but also more complex and frightening than she had previously imagined.

Fans of Marcia Muller's widely acclaimed Sharon McCone series will find Joanna Stark an engaging new character, and The Cavalier in White a powerful and riveting novel of suspense.

MARCIA MULLER is the author of the popular Sharon McCone mystery series. She lives in northern California.

Marcia Muller: The Cavalier in White. St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312125399 (June, 1986), 207 p., $15.95.