The 22 books to date in Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone series span from 1977, so this is one of the earlier ones (1984) in a set that obviously has staying power. Our leading lady is a full-time employee of a law firm where she handles investigations along with more routine paralegal work, but she seemed pretty free to roam around as she chose, with or without a paying client. Sharon's a just-thirty single private eye in the mode of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone or Karen Kijewski's Kat Colorado and reminded me of both of them, although indeed Sharon may have come first.
Our copy of the hardback was just 150 pages long, so it wasn't too long nor too complicated a tale. There seemed to be few recurring support characters and most of the story took place in California, but away from home base in San Francisco. The plot featured a couple of murders and some older questionable deaths spiced things up a little, but in general we found the book, while reasonably enjoyable, a little lackluster by modern standards. We might be inclined to check out a more recent work and see if that might be more satisfying before reading the set from the start forward. So -- not bad, but a rather typical entree in the female private eye genre...