Seventeen years had passed since Jean Timberlake's body had been found at the foot of the sea wall. At the time, Bailey Fowler, an ex-boyfriend of hers, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Now he'd changed his tune. Kinsey Millhone was called in to solve the case - then she stumbled on the dark secrets of a family's buried past.

A hilarious work that evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger.

Los Angeles has become a magnet for the American apocalyptic imagination, with many disasters - both real and those created by Hollywood movies - in recent years. This book examines the history of disaster - both real and imagined - in Los Angeles.

She was a 'Jane Doe', an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on, and after months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved.

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. Marlowe's got his work cut out. But that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

Kinsey Millhone, employed by Nord Lafferty to drive his daughter home from her incarceration at the Californian Institute for Women, marvels at the simplicity of the task. But Reba Lafferty emerges feisty and rebellious, and Kinsey is soon fighting to prevent her charge from breaking the conditions of her parole.

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation.

It is the seventies, at the height of flower power. Star has just joined Drop City, a hippie commune in sunny California living the simple, natural life. But underneath the drugs, music and transcendent bliss, she slowly discovers tensions and sexual rivalries that threaten to split the community apart.

It was a Monday early in December when Kinsey Millhone got involved in the Isabelle Barney murder case. Attorney Lonnie Klingman's usual private investigator had just dropped dead of a heart attack. The trouble started on the first day of the investigation. Either Kinsey's predecessor was incompetent - or someone had been getting away with murder.

'A brilliant memoir...it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it...Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai

PI Kinsey Millhone is on her way west when she detours into Nota Lake to check out a new client. And encounters a chill she can scarcely believe. Only six weeks have passed since sheriff's detective Tom Newquist died of a heart attack. His widow is sure he was keeping secrets from her just before he died - and she hires Kinsey to find out what.

The greatest crime novel of the 20th century launches Orion's Crime Masterworks series

For Kinsey Millhone, the investigation started with a visit from an ex-colleague at California Fidelity - the company that had fired her nine months previously. Fives hours later she was on a plane to Mexico, hot on the trial of a suicide who'd allegedly just come back to life.

After a three-week-long investigation, Kinsey couldn't wait to get home. What she needed most was a few quiet days by herself - but two things happened to change all her plans. First she ran into a murder case. Then Kinsey met Bibianna Diaz, and before the night was over they were sharing a prison cell.

The film of Steve Martin's hugely successful novel stars Steve Martin in the lead role with Claire Danes (TERMINATOR 3, THE HOURS, LITTLE WOMEN) and Bridgette Wilson (THE WEDDING PLANNER, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER).

It was the week before Thanksgiving when Kinsey Millhone first heard the sad story of the late Johnny Lee, the World War II fighter pilot of whom, rather mysteriously, the military authorities have no record. His family are concerned - perhaps Kinsey could make a few calls, straighten things out? Then Johnny's apartment is ransacked.

A naive young secretary, fresh out of Cleveland, tumbles headlong into a brave new world of laundromat Lotharios, pot-growing landladies, cut throat debutantes, and Jockey Shorts dance contests. The saga that ensues is manic, romantic, tawdry, touching, and outrageous.