In To Catch the Moon, we meet Deputy District Attorney Alicia Maldonado.  Alicia grew up on the wrong side of California’s Monterey Peninsula: not in Pebble Beach, gorgeous seaside enclave of the wealthy and powerful, but in dusty inland Salinas, home to generations of farm workers and day laborers.  Though every bit as beautiful and intelligent as the privileged women who live in the fog-shrouded acres by the sea, Alicia has had to scrabble up the hard way, supporting her mother and younger sisters after her father died, putting herself through college and law school, and now competing in the gritty world of criminal prosecution.

Then one chilly December night, timber millionaire Daniel Gaines, who just launched a campaign for California governor, is found dead in his Carmel home.  Though all the evidence points to an environmental extremist as the killer, Alicia becomes obsessed with the idea that Gaines was murdered by his own wife, the pampered only child of a former California governor.  As Alicia investigates the killing, she clashes repeatedly with Milo Pappas, a Greek ambassador’s son turned primetime network correspondent who is just as anxious to prove the lovely widow innocent as Alicia is to prove her guilty.

As journalist and prosecutor scramble to uncover the truth, first in opposition to one another and later as allies, Alicia is forced to examine her true motivation:  Is it in fact the noble pursuit of justice?  Or perhaps an ignoble resentment of the privileged few who reside in the Peninsula’s wealthier half?  Only a brave and honest answer will set Alicia free from the lifelong grudge that’s put a stranglehold on both her ambitions and her heart …


Here's a sneak peak at chapter one



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