Keepers: A Port Silva Mystery [Paperback]

Janet LaPierre (Author)

Book Description

Series: Port Silva Mysteries | Publication Date: September 1, 2001

Meet two new, fascinating Port Silva characters, Patience and Verity Mackellar, a mother-daughter private investigative team. Patience, a policeman's widow, has kept her late husband's PI agency. Verity, seeking refuge from a troubled marriage, joins her mother to do the legwork. Finding lost pets and exposing unethical doctors leads to more difficult and dangerous work. A lost child forces the duo undercover into a reclusive religious community. Amid the spectacular beauty of the Northern California's dramatic Mendocino Coast -- the Lost Coast -- two sets of mothers and daughters find their lives in jeopardy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Keepers: A Port Silva Mystery, sixth in Janet LaPierre's (Baby Mine) series, mother and daughter PIs Patience and Verity Mackellar, two new characters, search for a missing child. An undercover investigation in an insular religious community on California's Lost Coast provides a fitting background for the strange and dangerous goings-on that the Mackellars encounter. (Perseverance/John Daniel, $12.95 paper 252p ISBN 1-880284-44-8) Fifteen Jeffrey Rand and Leila Gaad stories appear in The Old Spies Club: And Other Rand Intrigues, by Edward D. Hoch (The Spy Who Read Latin and Other Stories). Rand, a semi-retired British espionage agent, and his wife Leila, an archeologist, embark on various and sundry Cold War adventures in Cairo, Moscow, London, New York and elsewhere.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A distraught father visits private investigator Patience Mackellar's office in Port Silva, California, seeking to find his missing family. This is the fifth mystery in LaPierre's Port Silva series, in which the characters change but the place remains the same. It's a well-paced story with a difficult-to-solve mystery at its core. LaPierre's portrayal of Port Silva, a fictional community near Mendocino, gets the feel of northern California just right, not only in the descriptions of the rugged coastline and dense woods but also in the people and plotline, which involves a New Ageish religious community. The book's strong female characters and northern California setting will appeal to fans of series by Marcia Muller and Susan Dunlap. This is a solid series that deserves more attention. John Rowen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Perseverance Press (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880284448
• ISBN-13: 978-1880284445
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #473,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely A Keeper, August 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Keepers: A Port Silva Mystery (Paperback)

This is a marvelous novel, complex and satisfying, and so suspenseful that it kept me up late into the night. Patience and Verity Mackellar are the most interesting team of sleuths I've read in recent years, and the author does a skillful job of developing their relationship, both as mother and daughter and as colleagues in a dangerous business. Even the minor characters in the book are fully developed, and the settings are so richly rendered that savoring them is the next best thing to a trip to the Northern California coast. Keepers is definitely a keeper.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel ida makes for a great mystery, August 28, 2001

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Keepers: A Port Silva Mystery (Paperback)

Port Silva is a small bucolic, visually quiet town in Northern California with a population of 25,000 which means everybody knows their neighbors to some degree. Patience Mackellar was married to a policeman when he caught a bullet and ended up in a wheelchair. Together they opened a private investigation agency, but now that she is a widow, she continues with the business because she enjoys it.

She also has a junior partner, her thirty-year-old daughter Verity who just returned home after her three-year-old marriage turned sour and brutal. Their latest client is David Simonov, whose wife divorced him to marry his best friend Dev Costello. David also gave up custodial rights to his daughter but now he thinks they may be in trouble and he wants them found. During the course of the investigation, Verity bounces from one predicament to another nearly getting herself killed trying to locate Lily and Sylvia.

Port Silva is the type of town anyone desiring to escape the big city would like to live in. Characters from the first book in the Port Silva series make cameo and recurring appearances leading to a feeling of continuity to this series. Janet La Pierre has written on entertaining character driven who-done-it that provides plenty of enjoyment for that cool fall night reading.

Harriet Klausner