Searching for Sara

Barrett Lake Mystery #3

by Shelley Singer

High-school history teacher Barrett Lake discovers Sara, a missing teen, hiding in San Francisco's Tenderloin district and mixed up in the murder of a shelter worker, a murder that Barrett is determined to solve. Original.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Aka Lee Singer.

Shelley Singer is the author of a dozen published novels and many short stories. One of her mysteries was nominated for the prestigious Shamus Award of the Private Eye Writers of America. She has written mysteries, science fiction, and mainstream fiction. Singer began her working life as a reporter with UPI in Chicago. During a checkered and mercifully brief journalism career, she met such luminaries as Nikita Khrushchev, Jimmy Hoffa, Xavier Cugat, Mrs. Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a condemned killer on death row. She never met Joseph Stalin. She teaches fiction writing classes and does manuscript consulting.

Reviews

[Nadica Boseva]

ameizing

[Karla Huebner]

This re-read pretty well, I was relieved to find (having the feeling that most of the mysteries I bought in the 90s should be dropped off at the local book exchange). Admittedly, part of the reason I still found it enjoyable was that it's set in Berkeley and San Francisco and deals with runaway and at-risk teens, thus takes me back to my days working in adolescent drug rehab in San Francisco (in a pleasant rather than appalling way).

[Mary (Biblophile) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Try as I might, I just couldn't get into this mystery. From the get-go, I could not connect with the main characters.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barrett Lake.
A teacher/private investigator is looking for a teen in San Francisco.
Murder in a teen shelter.
Pretty good.