Matera, Lia

Good Fight (A Laura Dipalma Mystery)

Attorney Laura Di Palma is in complete control of her high-profile life -- she's about to become a partner, signed lithographs decorate the walls of her spectacular San Francisco apartment, and her Mercedes is paid for. But control turns to utter chaos when her sick lover, Hal, disappears from his hospital bed without a word. Then Sandy, the detective she works with (and her former lover), begins pressuring her for a second chance. At work, she has a radical client who's accused of murdering an FBI agent. It's too much to handle, but Laura has no choice.
Frantically searching for Hal, Laura also attempts to build her client's controversial defense. Meanwhile, she must keep Sandy at a distance even as she needs his help. When a second man is murdered, Laura's carefully tailored life begins to unravel before her eyes . . . .
"Ms. Matera proves a tough-minded writer." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Extraordinary, thought-provoking." -- Baltimore Sun

Counsel for the Defense and Other Stories (Five Star First Edition Mystery Series)

Star Witness: A Willa Jansson Mystery (Willa Jansson)

Remember the "Twinkie Defense," where a lawyer tried to get his client off on a murder charge on the basis of too much sugar in his diet? Fictional (but totally believable) San Francisco attorney Willa Jansson goes one step beyond in this addition to Lia Matera's lively series: Willa uses the "UFO Defense," based on her client's memories (revealed under hypnosis) of being in an alien spaceship when his sports car went off the road and killed another driver. Jansson finds four squabbling UFO experts to support this defense strategy, and not the least of Matera's many high points in a book full of them is her ability to convince us that it might just have happened. Previous Jansson cases in paperback include Last Chants, Hidden Agenda, Prior Convictions, and Radical Departure.

Just when attorney Willa Jansson is about to take a little time off from her job at a Son Francisco multimedia firm, a friend calls in a special favor. So, on her first day of what should have been her well-earned vacation, Willa's off to Santa Cruz to solve what she hopes will be a simple case of vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run. But Willa is about to discover that nothing about this case -- or the town where it occurred -- is quite as it seems.

Alan Miller's sports car went over an embankment and onto the coastal highway below, landing atop another car and killing its driver. But there are no tire tracks, no witnesses, and Miller's injuries aren't consistent with a car crash. Unable to recall where he was just after the accident, Miller's memory is jogged under hypnosis -- a recollection so far-fetched that Willa knows it will never stand up in court. All of a sudden, seemingly idyllic Santa Cruz is rife with dangerous secrets, and Willa must outrun helicopters, snipers, reporters, her own interfering mother -- and try to maintain her credibility and her career by making the jury buy her client's out-of-this-world alibi. If she can just keep the witnesses alive long enough to testify....

WHERE LAWYERS FEAR/

Hard Bargain

"Matera is a solid writer. Her dialogue is pungent and her plotting careful."

Detroit Free Press

Everything Laura Di Palma owns she has earned -- including a resounding case of depression and job dissatisfaction as a rising young star in San Francisco's high-powered law circles. Taking off and taking stock, Laura has escaped to the country with her battered and taciturn lover, Hal.

But Laura's idyll doesn't last long. Her former lover, private detective Sandy Arkelett, shows up with the disturbing, emotional case of a young woman's suicide -- which may have been encouraged by her husband. As confused lives and twisted motives swirl around her, Laura discovers that morality and honesty are often at odds with each other, and may have nothing to do with the truth...

"With plenty of action and mystery, this is sensitive, thought-provoking writing."

Winston-Salem Journal

"Matera takes on social and moral issues. She also delivers the goods a mystery writer should, with intelligence, humor, and gutsy femininity."

Robert Campbell

Face Value (Laura Di Palma Mystery)

Smart Money

Laura Di Palma finally has it made. Eleven years ago, she ran from a broken marriage and her small northern California town in search of fame and fortune. As the smartest and most controversial young defense attorney in her high-class law firm, she found it. But she's got an old grudge back home that she can't let die. So she's moving back to ruin her ex-husband's career by taking the job he wants as public defender -- just long enough to make him squirm.
Once she evens up the score, Laura can go back to her big city life. Unfortunately, a few things get in the way, including two murders, a crazed killer on the loose, old wounds that haven't healed, and a forgotten feeling that Laura is almost afraid to name . . . .
"Laura Di Palma is one of the most compelling characters in recent mystery fiction." -- The Baltimore Sun

Prior Convictions

Willa Jansson is a cynical ex-radical who worked in an L.A. corporate law firm for a year and has the scars to prove it. Back home in San Francisco, her still activist parents ask her to do a favor for an ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend. And she quickly becomes embroiled in a case of conflicting interests, slow-dying passions, and political grudges that can kill....

Havana Twist: A Willa Jansson Mystery

Too often, the tension in a mystery flows from the same source as in a horror movie: As the character walks alone toward the empty, sinister house at night (of course), the audience collectively wrings its hands and groans, "Don't go in there." One can't help but wish that she or he were endowed with a little more common sense. Carry a flashlight, call for backup--something, for God's sake.

Fortunately, Havana Twist offers an antidote to that cliche in Willa Jansson, a no-nonsense Santa Cruz lawyer whose good judgement is matched only by her wry sense of humor--though sometimes neither is enough to keep her out of trouble. And this time, it's her own mother who has put her there.

When Jansson's political-activist mom doesn't return from Cuba with her group of "Jewish mothers of politics, ready to chicken-soup the whole third world," Willa must travel to the Communist island in search of her "Superlefty" mother. Jansson keeps a low profile as she searches Havana's dilapidated neighborhoods, trusting few with the fact of her mother's disappearance--and with good reason. The city's ubiquitous hotel room bugs, vanishing informants, and tight-lipped locals create a shifty atmosphere in which the unspoken can be as revealing as the spoken.

While smartly pursuing her mother's whereabouts and trying to stay out of jail, Willa manages to find a little time for a romance of sorts, although she's not unaware of the irony in her attraction to the police detective who was once almost fired because of her mother's police protest.

Matera adeptly adds unforeseen twists and turns to the plot, though she leaves it up to the reader to ponder which clues are bona fide and which are dead-ends. Matera has a knack for characterization and dialogue, and her contrast between Cuba's bleak economy, Mexico City's gaudy commercialism, and the U.S.'s comparative wealth adds a little sociopolitical weight to the story. Smart, sensible Willa Jansson is a pleasure to accompany on her search for that grey-haired brigadista she calls Mom. --Kris Law

Attorney Willa Jansson's mother has never balked at breaking the law, especially not for a good cause. So when Willa learns her mother has flouted federal regulations and gone off to Cuba, she figures it's just a harmless pilgrimage to lefty Graceland. But when her mother doesn't return with the rest of her peacenik tour group, Willa fears the feds might consider the trip "trading with the enemy" -- with a penalty of ten years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Worse, her mother's bleeding heart may finally have gotten her into more trouble than she can get herself out of.

In Lia Matera's Havana Twist, Willa risks her career and passport by rushing to Cuba to retrace her mother's steps. But she finds that nothing there is quite as it seems. Following clues to neighborhoods tourists never see, through secret tunnels beneath the street, and into the finest luxury hotels, Willa is manipulated, misled, and nearly arrested. And in the meantime, newfound reporter friends -- or are they CIA agents? -- disappear as suddenly and inexplicably as her mother did.

Soon the U.S. State Department, the Cuban Interior Ministry, and Willa's old flame, San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant Don Surgelato, get into the act. But politics and police work are a poor substitute for those things only a daughter would know. So, in a deadly game of cat and mouse, Willa follows her mother's trail from Havana to Mexico City, from California back to Havana...all the while keeping barely one step ahead of two angry governments and at least one ruthless killer.

Never before have the stakes been as high or as personal for Willa Jansson. The result is a pulse-pounding, white-knuckle ride of a mystery that shows Lia Matera at her very best.

A Radical Departure

"Has almost everytrhing a good mystery needs...a complex plot, social commentary, loads of atmosphere and a cast of unusual characters...The reader wants to hang out with Jansson and see more of her clear-eyed view of the world."
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Working for a fat-cat San Francsico law firm, Willa Jansson thought she'd seen everything. Then her boss dies from hemlock poisoning. Things go from awful to outrageous when Willa's rad-lib mother, a former client of the deceased, is suspiciously named in his will to inherit his fantastic home in the hills. By now Willa is frantic to discover what's going on around her. Poking into the recent past and the apolitical present, she fishes out an old boyfriend she'd rather forget, a cop she hates on principle, and a famous law firm that can barely make ends meet. It's a pretty good catch for a first-year associate--considering that, in the meantime, someone is trying to kill her....