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Edited to Death by Linda Lee Peterson

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Pub. Date: January 2005
221pp

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Product Details

Pub. Date: January 2005
Publisher: 21st Century Publishing
Format: Hardcover, 221pp

ISBN-13: 9780972262439
ISBN: 0972262431

Synopsis

Trivia-maven Maggie Fiori has all the ingredients for a perfect life — a handsome, attentive husband, two terrific kids, a reliable au pair, a house on the hill with views to die for, and a satisfying freelance life, working for the enigmatic Quentin Hart, editor of Small Town, San Francisco's chicest city magazine. But what wouldn't she do for a little excitement? Bored with carpools and itching to shed her khaki wrap-around skirt, Maggie makes a dangerous decision.

Her dueling desires for domestic bliss and adventure intensify when she finds Quentin's body slumped over his desk at home, her first serious investigative piece buried along with him, and to her horror, their extramarital affair exposed. With her husband now a potential suspect, Maggie determines to set everything right, convinced that discovering Quentin's murderer is the only way to wipe the slate clean. Risking everything to reclaim her former life, Maggie enters the vortex of Quentin's past, uncovering a trail of sexual misadventure and intrigue that begins in Oxford and ends on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Throwing her journalist's instinct into overdrive, she turns amateur sleuth, investigating leads and rattling cages, putting herself and her family in grave danger as a result.

Edited to Death is a delicious whodunit packed with glitterati intrigue, crisp dialogue and quirky characters, set against the glamour and eccentricity of a wonderfully nuanced San Francisco. Deftly weaving the angst of modern motherhood and marital remorse with real insight into the fated workings of the human psyche, Edited to Death is an effervescent concoction of humor, regret, and deception. Readers who enjoyed Susan Isaacs� classic COMPROMISING POSITIONS, Kate White�s Bailey Weggins� series (IF LOOKS COULD KILL, A BODY TO DIE FOR), and Laurie Colwin�s elegant comedies of domestic life, will relish Peterson�s debut novel.

Library Journal

Happily married housewife Maggie, who writes articles part-time for a chic little San Francisco magazine, finds her much-admired boss murdered at home. They were supposed to have lunch and discuss her exciting new breakthrough article, but now she's in the dark about the topic and she's a suspect, besides. Surprisingly, she and the bisexual Quentin were one-time lovers, so that makes Maggie's broker-husband is a suspect as well. Appointed acting editor, Maggie attempts to hold the magazine together while investigating the murder herself. Strong focus, admirable prose, and a nifty story line recommend this first novel. Peterson lives in northern California. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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Biography

Linda Peterson is the co-founder of Peterson Skolnick & Dodge, a marketing communications firm with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Philadelphia. This is her first novel. She and her husband, a judge, live in Lafayette, California. They have one son (and one daughter-in-law!).

Linda is an award-winning writer, and a frequent speaker and lecturer on writing, communication and marketing topics. She was the recipient of the International Association of Business Communicators' first Distinguished Communicator award. She has been cited by Inc. Magazine as one of the West’s “new breed of entrepreneurs.” Although Edited to Death is Linda’s first novel, she has written the text for a number of other books, including The Stanford Century, Chronicle Books’ On Flowers, HarperCollins’ Linens and Candles. She is also a frequent contributor to publications including the Chicago Tribune.

Her consulting and creative services clients include a mix of corporate, academic, arts, and environmental organizations.

In the literary community, Linda is a frequent interviewer for on-stage author events. She has interviewed Scott Turow for The Stanford Conference on Publishing, and Amy Tan, Gus Lee, and Whitney Otto for the San Francisco New Main Library series. She co-founded the popular Sweet Thursdays literary salons for the Lafayette Library, and has been a garden columnist for Diablo Magazine and was a regular contributor to The San Francisco Review of Books.

Linda is a graduate of Stanford University.

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March 22, 2005: If you're interested in a clever plot, snappy dialogue, a setting to die for and fine writing, read Edited to Death. Linda Peterson's sleuth, Maggie Fiori, a magazine writer/wife/mother will appeal to any mystery reader, regardless of your preferred genre. You'll want to turn the pages to find out what happens to Fiori, but you'll linger long enough to savor the vivid descriptions of the San Francisco Bay Area, and pick up the clues cleverly placed throughout the locale.

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March 09, 2005: I found this novel engaging and entertaining because of the characters that populate it. There aren't many mysteries that have a marriage within them that are central to the plot as well as a source of suspense. Maggie and Michael are definitely not Nick and Nora; indeed, calling Maggie an 'amateur sleuth' is probably an overstatement. The murder victim's relationships with the other colorful people in the book make his presence as animated as theirs. San Francisco itself is a major character and Peterson renders the city with the same skill as her other subjects. I enjoyed this book a great deal.

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Robert Heilbrun
Edited to Death is laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, and gripping. Maggie Fiori is a wonderful new character in detective fiction.
— Edgar-nominated author of Offer of Proof

Michael Castleman
Edited to Death is a page-turner. The heroine is complex and thoroughly likeable. The characters are a provocative cross-section of San Francisco. And the plot is compelling, with more twists and turns than Lombard Street.
— author of The Lost Gold of San Francisco

Terry Ryan
Heroine Maggie Fiori's love of trivia makes for a great detective. As any crime buff knows, it's the little things that count. This book is smart, fast, and funny — a mystery to remember long after the last page.
— author of The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio

Jacqueline Winspear
If you are a Susan Isaacs fan, you will love Linda Peterson's journalist cum sleuth, Maggie Fiori. This is a San Francisco and Oakland story with sparks flying as wisecracking Fiori, with her razor-sharp wit and rampant curiosity, sets out to find out who killed her editor boss. I couldn't put the book down. A very satisfying read for mystery lovers.
— author of Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, and Edgar finalist for best mystery novel in 2003 for Maisie Dobbs, and winner of the Agatha for best mystery.

Sheldon Siegel
Edited to Death is an exceptional debut. With an engaging protagonist and a likeable cast, Linda Peterson brings a fresh new voice to a crowded field. It makes you hope that she can pry herself away from her marketing career long enough to write a couple of sequels.
— New York Times best-selling author of The Confession and Final Verdict

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Chapter 1: Beyond Books and Cooks

Here's something I can count on: If the phone rings twice before nine on a Friday morning, neither one of those calls is likely to be from the California State Lottery.

It’ll be some carpool rearrangement or the automated voice at Sears telling me that, at long last, that extra special drill bit is in. That's about as good as early morning news gets.

At our house, we’ve got the bell turned up to dangerous decibel levels in order to hear it over the early morning racket — plummy voices on National Public Radio doing stories about imperiled loons or loony voices doing stories about imperiled plums, the kids squabbling over the last onion bagel, dogs and cats complaining about breakfast — right here, right now, and make it snappy! — and Anya, our melancholic Nordic au pair caroling from upstairs, “Maggie! Have you black tights without runners? Mine are too holey.”

A person could get a headache. But through the din one fine fall morning, I heard that brrring! brrring! and Michael shouting, “Let the machine pick it up. It’s nobody good. I know it.”

But I couldn’t. Not in the morning. Could be the lottery.

The first caller was my freshman-year roommate, Sara Jenkins. She lives in London now, with her brilliant-but-dithery investment banker husband. When I picked up the phone she whispered, "Maggie, it's me. I need to know something quick."

Sara? What's wrong?"

"Listen carefully," she said. "What happens eight days after the Nones of each month?"

"The Ides."

"Thanks, you're great. I knew you'd know."

Through the transatlantic crackle, I could tell Sara had her hand cupped around the receiver. I pictured her, dressed in her respectable English matron sweater and skirt, huddled in a corner of their elegant but drafty Sloan Square house, making surreptitious phone calls.

"Why? Why are you whispering? What's going on?"

"We're entertaining some business chums of Richard's . 51; all weekend. By teatime I'd run out of small talk, so we broke out the Trivial Pursuit. I'm supposed to be upstairs searching out a sweater — it’s like Siberia in the house, as usual. I've got to go."

"You spent Richard's cold, hard cash to cheat?"

"To get a wedge? You bet.” She giggled. “Richard’s money? What kind of a feminist are you, Maggie? Besides, it's English money — it's not worth anything anyway."

And she was gone. Without looking up from the paper, Michael said, "What's wrong with Sara? Her hollandaise separating again?"

Nope. She was cheating at Trivial Pursuit."

Michael lowered the paper and shook his head. "That woman needs to get a job. Take her mind off all this domestic competition."

"She said it didn't matter. English money isn't worth anything. Is that right? I thought it was our money or Malaysian ringgits or something that aren’t worth anything."

Michael said, "Mmmm" and returned to the sports page. He looked like a man who should be reading the business page. Six feet of respectability, packaged as usual in a starched white shirt with French cuffs. Gray suit, red silk tie, and his father’s watch on a chain. Of course, when he wasn’t dressed like this — as he was every work day of his life — he looked like a not-very-successful panhandler. Threadbare blue jeans or cords and an unfortunate collection of ratty sweatshirts. Michael was a man who’d missed out on the entire retail concept of casual clothes. But he wasn’t reading the business page; he was deep in some bloodthirsty recounting of an ice hockey game, wondering if it was still too late to try out for the San Jose Sharks.

But, about Sara, he had a point. She thought nothing of picking up the telephone to ask me if making hollandaise in a blender would keep it from separating, or to read me Colin's sonnet for school so I could fix the rhyme scheme. Since my major accomplishment in life is accumulating useless bits of information, we talked almost weekly. Sara carries almost no peripheral information around in her head, preserving all that space for life on a higher plane. She volunteers for underfunded pacifist groups and tutors graduate students in calculus.

Half an hour later, I was enjoying five minutes of the kind of solitude and silence only mothers with young children can appreciate. Lunches made, arguments mediated, socks found, animals fed, family out the door.

Josh was in school, developing interpersonal skills, experimenting with spatial relationships, and learning an occasional fact about history or grammar on the side. When I was ten, I was busy trying to wrest the four-square court away from Elise McElroy, who outweighed me by twenty-two pounds. If I wasn't locked in combat with Elise, I was trying to figure out why Dick and Jane never watched television, the activity of choice among my peers. Josh is the worrier in the family. If something troubles his serene environment, he develops brutal stomach cramps or throws up, usually without warning. Just as well he’s not wrestling to the death over four-square.

Zachary, my darling youngest, was in kindergarten. It was Friday. That meant he was acting out his hostile fantasies about me with the fantasy facilitator who came in once a week. Of course, when I was five and foolish enough to act on a hostile fantasy, I got sent to my room.

Michael was off giving obscure and probably un-followable tax advice to the undeserving rich.

"A tax lawyer does God's work," he announced to the children many a morning over breakfast. "Especially if he's a Democrat." Since the boys weren't yet up to ambiguous antecedents, they never called him on whether the Democratic "he" was God or the tax lawyer. Nor, for that matter, did I. I like a certain amount of peace with my bagel. Besides, Michael took such pure, undiluted pleasure in cooking up tax dodges for his foundation and nonprofit clients, I figured he deserved to deliver a self-righteous soliloquy or two over the breakfast table. Plus, he dressed the part.

So, was I enjoying the bliss of post-breakfast solitude? Of course not. I was fretting over magazine deadlines. Should I go up to the computer waiting in the den and finish the research on "The Literate Manager: Role Models in Literature for Contemporary Business People," do an outline for "Maturely Mozart: Learning to Love Amadeus Late in Life," write a book review on a promising, if inaccessible, first novel (lots of sentence fragments and nanotech allusions), or do a first draft on "Goldilox: A Guided Tour through the Bay Area's lox-and-Bagel Emporia." Of the four, only the Goldilox piece really stirred me. But that was probably because my bagel and cream cheese cried out for a little company.

I sighed. There were some non-work alternatives. But they seemed like worse work than work; there were bulbs to plant, the checkbook to balance, and flea collars ready and waiting for our menagerie of three cats (Batman, Robin, and the Riddler) and a dog. Raider, a German shepherd, named for Oakland’s silver and black football hooligans, came and put his head in my lap and whimpered. He was bored, too.

I looked around the sunny kitchen. It was too nice a day to do any of those things. Fall in Oakland is inspiring, as it is all over Northern California. Crisp, warm days, with just enough trees turning and shedding to give the place atmosphere. Not enough, on the other hand, to make even the most dutiful householder haul out a rake each and every weekend.

With all the shortcomings of our sixty-year old, five-bedroom, permanently disordered house, there were beautiful views from every room.

I decided the choices needed further study, poured another cup of Ethiopian Mocha Harrar (to live in the Bay Area any time in the last quarter-century and not be "into" coffee was to risk treatment as a social leper) and settled down to an intensive study of the jumbled word game in the San Francisco Chronicle. I looked around for a clean spoon to stir with, settled for the ha ndle-end of a knife, and took a sip. I figured I had another hour of peace before Anya, our au pair-cum-art student, breezed in from her "Painter-as-Poet" class with still another insight about the references to textiles in Amy Lowell's poetry.

Then the phone rang again.

"Margaret?"

American-born and Oxford-educated Quentin Hart was the only person who ever called me Margaret. Of course, he was also the only person I've ever known who gargled with mineral water, honestly feared for the souls of people who wore man-made fabrics, and refused to wear contact lenses because they seemed spiritually dishonest. I was Quentin's "discovery." He was my editor at Small Town magazine — and my friend.

"Quentin. God, it's good to hear from you."

"Any particular reason?"

I looked around the kitchen, still cluttered with Peter Rabbit dishes, two sick philodendra that needed re-potting, and a week's worth of newspapers. Quentin lived in impeccable near-solitude. Having understood — and then transcended — the need to marry well, he had systematically divested himself of clutter, both physical and emotional. He and his wife owned Small Town, California's chicest city magazine. Actually, Claire owned the magazine, or almost; she stood to inherit it from her ghastly and ever-so-healthy Uncle Alf. Quentin, after a few years of laboring in the journalistic vineyards, married the owner’s niece a nd settled in to editing the magazine, with minimal meddling from both Claire and Uncle Alf. His gift for finding and nurturing good writers with original voices had rescued the magazine from near-collapse. Under his guidance, Small Town developed style, and even a little substance.

Advertisers, shocked by finding a vehicle people actually read, responded with enthusiasm. The magazine grew fat with advertising pages that peddled spectacularly useless stuff to the privileged. Those of us who scribbled for Small Town were grateful.

Almost two years ago, Claire and Quentin separated. Quentin cleared every trace of Claire out of their flat, lived alone for a year, and then invited his companion / assistant / friend Stuart to live in. Most people assumed that Quentin and Stuart's relationship had some sexual overtones; but as Michael once observed early in his acquaintance with Quentin, "How could that guy have sex with anyone? Surely he doesn't actually undress. Don't you think he just goes to the dry cleaners along with his blazers to get his carnal desires attended to?" I didn’t respond to Michael’s speculation. I saw nothing good coming out of a discussion about what I knew about Quentin’s antiseptic-but-complex love life.

"Well, my dear, I'm glad you're glad I called," Quentin was saying. "Can you come by? I have a thing or two for the January issue."

"Terrific," I said, sensing rescue from the word processor, the garden, and the kitchen. "You mean besides the lox piece?"

"How's that coming?"

"It's just fine. I have a first draft on the screen," I lied. "It's fun, kind of, um, salty," I improvised.

Quentin sighed. "You haven't started yet, I take it."

Feeling courageous, I pressed on. "Listen, don’t you think I could do something besides books and food for a bit? I'm up to it — you know that."

Indeed, Quentin did know. He had discovered me, as he liked to insist when people accused the magazine of precious elitism. Some suburban cousin of his had shown him a piece I'd written for a parents' community newspaper on what was wrong with most children's books. "I read this piece," Quentin recounts, "expecting to see another paean to non-sexist personal growth platitudes in children's literature; and what do I encounter? Wit, vitriol, and down-right nastiness. I knew right off Margaret belonged in our magazine’s little stable of contributors.”

So, Quentin tracked me down and lured me out of semi-retirement to write a piece for Small Town. I'd worked as managing editor of a trade magazine for nurses before the babies came along, and had just started itching to put words on paper again. Writing was much more fun than editing. Quentin gave me an irresistible first assignment — test driving sports cars. He'd titled the piece, "June Cleaver Hits the Road." I had a memorable time, after a little coaching from the National Association of Professional Drivers. Slaloming through cones, cornering, taking "hot laps" — I did it all, and Small Town got a story with a distinctive angle. What's more, I rose miles in Josh's estimation. Taped to the inside of his lunch box, he still carries a photo of me in helmet and jumpsuit, to show off to his buddies. That made up for the guilt I felt when Michael brought him to the track to watch me drive and Josh promptly threw up as soon as I crossed the finish line.

"Margaret," Quentin chided. "Books and cooks are two perfectly acceptable subjects. They represent my major passions — nowadays, at any rate."

"Come on, you know what I mean," I said, trying to sound more like Dorothy Thompson and less like Dorothy Parker, and not particularly eager to discuss Quentin’s other passions. "Front of the book hard stuff, power plays in high places, chemical spills threatening sleepy suburbs."

Quentin interrupted, "When, precisely, was the last time Small Town investigated anything more toxic than badly made martinis?"

I conceded the point. "I don't really think the magazine ought to do that stuff. It's just that I've been watching too many reruns of The Year of Living Dangerously. I think I want to be a journalist where the action is."

"There's plenty of action here," said Quentin. "All the people in East Pumpkin Corner think this is the most dangerous place on earth. They think if you don't get AIDS from the mud baths in Calistoga or a hot tub in Marin, you'll get knocked off in the crossfire of some overdressed drug kings in Oakland or underdressed drag queens in San Francisco.”

"You happen to be stereotyping the place I'm raising my children."

"Well, read the papers. I happen to think we live with more than an adequate amount of danger myself." For a moment, Quentin's arch tone had a new edge.

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know. We'll probably all die of raspberry vinaigrette poisoning in some stainless-steel, high-concept yuppie-teria next week. Listen, if you want to go cover war-torn nations and unstable dictatorships, do it. What are you waiting for?"

"Well, for openers, there's Josh and Zach. And, in my limited experience, war-torn nations rarely need tax lawyers."

"A point in their favor," murmured Quentin. "And that's exactly the issue. You want all your domestic bliss — and excitement, too.”

I didn’t respond. Quentin knew far too much about my dueling desires for domesticity and thrills.

He continued, “Life is choices, my dear. So make yours, and as you say to one and all, don't kvetch."

"You shouldn't pronounce both the k and the v with equal weight," I said. “On second thought, you just may be too Waspy to even use the word, Quentin.”

"I'll bear that in mind," he replied dryly.

"Okay, I'm sorry," I said. "Last week there was a partners' dinner at Michael's firm, a bar association cocktail party, and I had to make cupcakes for Josh's class. I'm just feeling a little too wife and mommy-ish."

"You made cupcakes? You hate to bake."

"Well, actually Michael made them. But I had to frost them. Truly, I will stop kvetching. Tell me what you've got that's coming up. I'll even do a ‘In Search of the Perfect Chocolate Truffle’ story for Valentine's Day."

"Spare me," said Quentin. "Actually, it's quite peculiar, you raising this issue about stretching your usual repertoire. That’s exactly what I’ve got in mind. Tell me,” he paused, “what do you know about the Cock of the Walk?”

I snorted. “It’s how my boys behave when they think they’ve pulled a fast one on me.”

“Mothers,” muttered Quentin. “Imagine how uninterested I am in the little darlings’ psychology. So, you don’t know anything about the Cock of the Walk?”

I sighed, “Come on, Quentin, let’s not play Twenty Questions.”

“Usually you like games,” he said.

I didn’t want to encourage further discussion along those lines either. “Okay, okay,” I said. "Sounds like a restaurant on Polk Street." Polk Street, which predated the Castro distri ct as San Francisco's most notable gay neighborhood, featured restaurants, bars, and boutiques with relentlessly cute names that mined predictable veins — a local spirits store named Sukkers Likkers, for example.

"You're not far off the mark. It is a restaurant."

"Hey," I protested. "I thought this was going to be different."

"Patience, my pet. It is a restaurant, although not on Polk Street. It's in The Frog Pond.”

The Frog Pond was the latest in a series of gentrified revivals of old buildings, a la Boston's Fanueil Hall and San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square.

"A review? You want me to do a review? What about Lisbet?" Lisbet Traumer was Small Town’s regular restaurant reviewer, a woman who thought capital punishment was an under-reaction to overcooked vegetables and indifferent service.

"Don't worry about Lisbet. She'll do the review in good time. My interest in The Cock of the Walk has nothing to do with the food there. I think we have the opportunity to run a good story — and right a few wrongs along the way.”

“How moral,” I said. “How surprising.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Quentin. “It could ruin my reputation as a self-absorbed son of a bitch.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I protested.

Quentin laughed. “Certainly it is. Now, here's what we need to do to get you out of your wife-and-mommy funk. Shed that dreary little wraparound khaki skirt I know you have on." I looked down. It was denim, not khaki. "Put on something splendid, come to the City, and I'll take you to lunch and we'll talk about this piece."

"Can I wear a hat?”

Quentin was the only man of my acquaintance who actually liked women in hats. This, of course, irritated Michael, who found it further evidence that Q uentin was “not his kind of guy.” He wasn’t, but for reasons Michael had yet to fathom.

"Certainly,” said Quentin. “The little brown derby with the veil, I think. The one that makes you act like Myrna Loy."

"I'll run by the office just before noon?"

"No, come by my flat. I'm working at home this morning. We'll go somewhere in the neighborhood and eat decadent things."

Edited to Death by Linda Lee Peterson

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Edited to Death by Linda Lee Peterson

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Edited to Deathby Anonymous

Edited to Deathby Anonymous

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Library Journal

What People Are Saying

Product Details

Read an Excerpt

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More by This Author

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