Last Chants

von Lia Matera

San Francisco lawyer Willa Jansson is back in this "accomplished, compelling” (Publishers Weekly) fifth entry in the series by Edgar-nominated author Lia Matera.

When Willa Jansson inexplicably spots an old family friend, eccentric mythologist Professor Arthur Kenna, seemingly holding a stranger at gunpoint in downtown San Francisco, she has no choice but to take action, snaring the elderly professor and spiriting him away to a cabin in the mountains to hide him from the police until she can get to the bottom of the situation. Arthur, it seems, stands accused of the murder of his assistant, a shaman who was participating in an unusual computer experiment just before he was gruesomely disemboweled at the legendary magnetic "power spot” at Bowl Rock. As Willa and her PI friend Edward Hershey desperately search the crime scene for clues that will clear the professor's name, they encounter a series of characters as wild and strange—and potentially deadly—as the woods itself.