Legal Mystery

In An Element of Peril, the 10th Peter Sharp legal mystery, Peter faces a unique triple task: First, he must defend a domestic servant who has been charged with the chainsaw-killing of her boss; second, if he can get the servant acquitted, he must then defend the insurance company from being forced to pay a five-million-dollar life insurance policy on the boss's life by proving that she was not murdered and is still alive; and third, he must discover how the alleged corpse of the servant's boss disappeared.

Peter Sharp's privacy has been invaded: someone knows that he is a devout fan of mysteries, especially those featuring Sherlock Holmes...and some events take place that have elements coinciding with the names and occurrences in the Holmes stories.

In this 11th adventure of the 20 Peter Sharp and Suzi B. mysteries, due to a conflict of interest between the county and the defendant, attorney Peter Sharp is asked by the district attorney's office to step in and act as special prosecutor in a criminal case of first degree murder.

There are many types of mysteries, but one stands out over all the others: the ones involving a locked room. Over the years, every mystery writer worth his salt has tried to come up with the one that tops all the rest: the secret compartments, the doors locked from the inside, the confused timeline, etc. Jacques Futrelle set the standard with his Problem in Cell 13 but there hasn't been a really fine stumper since then. Until now.

More than half way back from Catalina Island on his boat, a man makes a ship-to-shore S.O.S. radio call to the Marina del Rey Coast Guard, but before he can describe his emergency, a gun is heard being fired on his boat and the transmission ends. When a crew lowered from the Coast Guard helicopter board his boat and find his body, there is no other person on the boat... and no way that any other person could have boarded his boat going 30 miles an hour, and gotten away from the speeding boat.

The case involved in this Peter Sharp adventure is a dramatic escalation of the jury-tampering attempts made by organized crime back in the roaring 20's when one of their leaders' freedom was in jeopardy, in that it goes a step higher and threatens not a juror, but the judge hearing the case.