In her fourth appearance Boston-based artist-sleuth Calista Jacobs uncovers the corrosive effects of generations of genteel power and social position. While sketching bonsai trees lovingly tended by society matron Queenie Kingsley, Jacobs uncovers murky secrets in one of Boston's Brahmin families.

In the third Calista Jacobs mystery, Jacobs and her son Charley join archeologist Archie Baldwin in Arizona. There, they encounter a sinister New Age cult, headed by Pahata Ra, who claims to be the reincarnation of a 65,000-year-old woman from the Russian steppes. When Calista recognizes Pahata as her old college roommate, she suspects foul play.

Children's book illustrator Calista Jacobs and her teenage son Charley are back in a new mystery featuring fundamentalist extremists, archeology and computer-enhanced genetic research. Calista and two of her colleagues are verbally attacked--called "immoral" influences--at a children's literature conference in Boston. Then one of them is murdered. Calista must solve the case before she becomes the next victim.

Harvard physicist Tom Jacobs dies from a rattlesnake bite in the Nevada desert. His widow Calista and bright young son Charley help each other endure the tragedy as they go on living in Cambridge. Soon, the duo suspects that Tom's death was more than a simple accident.

Named after the heroine of the Wizard of Oz and given a dog named Toto, Dorothy has never been entirely comfortable about being identified with her fictional counterpart, to whom things seem to happen in a random manner. Suddenly widowed at age 52, Dorothy finds herself for the first time acting in a drama for which she has no script.