My recent trip to San Francisco included a visit to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley where some of the jewels of the California Detective Fiction collection were on display, including the papers of legal thriller author John Lescroart. Lescroart is among my all-time favorite writers; I was inordinately pleased to meet him in person at ThrillerFest years ago.
Lescroart’s fictional world of attorney Dismas Hardy, cop Abe Glitsky, and their friends and associates fits so neatly into the real world of San Francisco that I can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. In his ensemble thriller series Lescroart created a sprawling universe of personalities with family or friends or random connections to each other, a few of which come to the fore for each book. One of the charms of the series for me is that the other characters continue their lives in the background of each book, and their adventures during that period sometime become the plot of a later book, resulting in a series that is difficult to view chronologically. Just like real life.
After the conference I pulled out one of my favorites in the series, Guilt (Delacorte Press, 1997), in which Sergeant, later Lieutenant, Abe Glitsky takes center stage. Mark Dooher is a wealthy attorney with an enviable life. Everything he touches turns to gold. Yet he’s triggered the suspicions of Glitsky who is lead investigator for the murder of a small-time lawyer thatat was threatening litigation against one of Dooher’s platinum clients. In the intense political maelstrom of San Francisco’s City Hall Dooher is able to pull enough strings to make Glitsky drop the case. Then a few months later Dooher’s wife is murdered. Curiously, she’s poisoned and then stabbed.
This time Glitsky collects enough evidence to justify bringing a case and Dooher stands trial. Dooher’s college friend Wes Farrell defends him zealously, grateful for the opportunity to do something to help his long-time comrade. Farrell has always been the less successful of the two, the admitted satellite to Dooher’s sun, and watching Farrell come into his own and shed the persona of the underachieving sidekick is a brilliant piece of character development.
The outcome as usual is not what might be expected nor does it occur at the point in the narrative when it might be expected. It’s still satisfyingly complete.
The main character of most of the books, lawyer Dismas Hardy, stays firmly in the background here, with a single reference in passing. Some scenes take place in the Little Shamrock, though, a bar owned by Hardy and his brother-in-law. There are beautiful descriptions of San Francisco and Ojai, a California city further south.
And there’s food, always lots of food. Dismas Hardy is forever cooking in his books but there are as many culinary references here as ever. Game hens for a dinner party; a perfect dore sauce and a perfect sourdough bread; pate, three kinds of cheese, French bread, and cornichons to go with cocktails. There is of course the standing reference to Lou the Greek, a hopefully mythical restaurant near the courthouse that specializes in Greek and Chinese fusion cuisine. Each book mentions a daily special that sounds positively awful. Lescroart must have had a lot of fun dreaming them up.
Lescroart posted a note on his website in 2024 telling his readers that he had decided to retire. His retirement is well earned but I confess to a secret hope that he will feel the need to tell one or two more stories some day soon.
In the mean time he’s left more than two dozen absorbing books to entertain us. Highly recommended!