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.
Collin Wilcox (1924–1996) was an American author of mystery fiction. Born in Detroit, he set most of his work in San Francisco, beginning with 1967’s The Black Door—a noir thriller starring a crime reporter with extrasensory perception. Under the pen name Carter Wick, he published several standalone mysteries including The Faceless Man (1975) and Dark House, Dark Road (1982), but he found his greatest success under his own name, with the celebrated Frank Hastings series.