San Francisco investigator John Tanner takes on two unrelated cases that suddenly blend as smoothly as a pair of limousines colliding. It's typically Californian, Tanner feels, because the problem isn't the missing persons but rather the people he keeps finding. An estranged son who doesn't want his dying father's millions. A "girl reporter" who keeps knocking him into the muck she rakes up constantly. And a client who keeps dying over and over and over.

Death Bed is well outside the ordinary limits of mystery fiction. This is not a simple whodunit, but a compelling, perversely charming book about who did what to whom way back when and why they're about to be very, very sorry.