Jill Smith Books

Hard-nosed beat cop Jill Smith combs Berkeley for a Buddhist guru-killing cultist In Berkeley, California, Telegraph Avenue is the headquarters for the city’s strangest inhabitants. Cultists, drug addicts, and hippie burnouts wander its streets, looking to raise their consciousness or, if that fails, to just get high. And Jill Smith walks with them, a beat cop with her finger on the pulse of one of the most unique neighborhoods in America. With time on her hands after her divorce, Jill lets a friend drag her to hear the district’s hot new guru, a Buddhist holy man from Bhutan. As his disciples clap and cheer , Jill tries to keep from smirking. The guru finally draws her attention, however, when he slumps forward with a knife in his back. She calls for backup and cordons off the temple. Jill doesn’t care about karma, but she knows when justice is due.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome.  For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah.  Her ex wants a favor.  His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing.  Anne's ransacked apartment--complete with blood-sprayed walls--gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder.  Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker.  But her best suspect is her ex:  the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons--the ones that can set her temperature on boil, break her heart, or ruin her life.

When the car accident that kills wealthy Ralph Palmerson proves to be foul play, Berkeley cop Jill Smith uncovers a variety of suspects, including Palmerson's much younger wife, a secretive Vietnamese mechanic, and the mysterious Shareholders-5

Berkeley detective Jill Smith investigates the murder of handicapped Liz Goldenstern at the construction site of a building designed for the disabled

Jill investigates the death of a chef who was mysteriously poisoned by his own soup Until the helicopter crash, Jill Smith never knew fear. A homicide detective in the leftist enclave of Berkeley, California, she has faced down her share of thugs, thieves, and killers, but since surviving the downed helicopter, her nerves have been shot. Unwilling to submit to her anxiety, she goes back to work. The chef and owner of Paradise, an upscale restaurant in Berkeley’s so-called “Gourmet Ghetto,” is found on the floor of his own kitchen, poisoned by the soup he was seasoning. On his way to the top of the foodie pyramid, the chef made enemies of his dishwasher, his neighbors, and Earth Man, a hippie holdout who lives on kitchen scraps. To pinpoint the killer, Jill will have to remember what it means to be fearless. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Susan Dunlap including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Berkeley policewoman Jill Smith investigates a series of bizarre events involving a dentist attacked by a eucalyptus tree, a female mountain climber, and murder

When Philip Drem, the most feared and hated IRS auditor, is murdered, junk food junkie Jill Smith finds a long list of suspects among Berkeley's eclectic community. 15,000 first printing.

It was part street theater, part civil  disobedience, and pure Berkeley: Someone was waging  guerrilla warfare on the city's meter maids and their  beloved parking meters. But when the prankster took  detective Jill Smith and her colleagues on a wild  chase into a deep, overgrown ravine, the game led  to murder. The dead woman was Madeleine Riordan.  A firebrand attorney who was not above an act of  civil disobedience herself, Madeleine spent her  last days in a nursing home that was perched on the  edge of a ravine. Praying into the extraordinary  life and times of Madeleine Riordan, Jill  discovered a strange connection between the meter capers  and the frail, cancer stricken woman who had once  been an unyielding defender of individual liberties.  And then Jill found something else: a crime  Madelene had witnessed, and died trying to stop. .  .

From bestselling author Susan Dunlap comes this wry, indecently entertaining mystery involving politics, murder--and nudity. Where else but in Berkeley, California, could naked protesters, competing health clubs, and ex-sixties radicals add up to murder?  And who else would find herself smack in the middle of this crisis than back-on-the-beat Detective Jill Smith, the beloved protagonist of seven previous Susan Dunlap mysteries? During a protest of the recent city ordinance against nudity, Jill is called in to put a stop to a slew of naked protesters.  While she's at it, she runs into Bryn Wiley, founder of a local gym, who complains of vandalism, and suspects that the culprit is Sam Johnson, a hostile ex-sixties radical who owns a competing health club.  Jill starts to investigate, but is halted by a much larger crime: Bryn is shot at close range, and a lot of questions need to be answered.  Who shot Bryn and why?  What happened to all the idealists who are dropping their values and selling out?  And how is the irrepressible Jill Smith going to figure it all out?

In a city of rule breakers, she's the law.  But in a hunt for a killer, she's breaking all the rules.... In Berkeley, people don't just disagree, they make careers out of it. And in a city where anything goes, where burned-out sixties hippies haunt the shadows along Telegraph Avenue, no one can outrun the past. Now police detective Jill Smith is plunged into a case that's pure Berkeley: a tangled tale of sins and retribution that has led to one man's disappearance, and another man's murder. The missing man is Jill's friend, countercultural private eye Herman Ott, who always wears yellow and always offends. The murder victim was a flamboyant mediator of civic disputes, found shot to death in Ott's office. Now, fearing for Ott's safety, and defying the wishes of her own male-dominated department, Jill is about to wade into the wild, woolly world of Berkeley's most contentious citizens. For somewhere among the passionate, the poseurs, and the pranksters lurks a killer--and one very good reason why Herman Ott is running for his life.... From the Paperback edition.