10 crime books set in Berkeley: Summer reading to thrill you

It’s a scene ripped from the headlines: UC Berkeley has just erected a chain-link fence around People’s Park, which protesters promptly tear down.

While this happened numerous times in real life, it is also the opening of the third Clay Edison novel written by the father-son duo Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman.

Workers at the park uncover a decades-old skeleton and Deputy Coroner Edison must investigate. Then he gets a call from a local businessman, wondering if it’s the body of his sister who disappeared 50 years ago.

The investigation sparks community tensions in a city always on the edge of protest.

Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor who shot to national fame with her controversial 2011 book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," returns to her childhood roots in the East Bay in "The Golden Gate."

Berkeley homicide detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel in 1944 when he is called back to investigate the assassination of a presidential hopeful in an upstairs room.

As Sullivan examines who might have killed the rich industrialist turned politician, he discovers eerie connections to the decade-old death of a child from one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families — rumored to haunt the hotel to this day.

Political power, ghostly memories and the looming presence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek come together in this historical noir.

Nikki Griffin has a dual life. By day, she runs a small bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. By night, she is a private investigator.

And she has a third, secret mission: to remove women from dangerous situations — and to punish the men who hurt them.

In "One Got Away," the second installment of S.A. Lelchuk’s series, Nikki investigates how a con man has defrauded the matriarch of one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families.

She soon discovers that no one is telling the whole truth — a situation that puts her own life in peril.

This psychological thriller delivers an unnerving premise: What if your brother is a domestic terrorist? That’s what Natalie Askedahl has to consider.

The youngest child of one of California's most prominent political families, Natalie has been living a picture-perfect life in the Berkeley Hills with her lawyer husband and two young daughters.

But then a man nicknamed the “Cal Bomber” begins detonating devices at colleges around the state and releases a manifesto eerily reminiscent of the writing of her estranged older brother Bobby, who Natalie hasn’t seen in 15 years.

She has to consider the worst, and is torn about what to do. Does she protect her brother? Or does she turn him in to the police?

Billie Flanagan set aside her radical past when she married Jonathan, had Olive and settled into a brown-shingle home off College Avenue in the Elmwood district.

As "Watch Me Disappear" opens, Billie has been missing for a year. She vanished on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness. Searchers only found one hiking boot.

As Jonathan copes with his grief, he drinks to excess and waits for the one-year anniversary so he can legally declare Billie dead and collect her $250,000 life insurance policy.

He also starts a memoir about their life together, but the more he digs and discovers what Billie did after she ran away from home when she was 16, the less he understands her.

Meanwhile Olive has been having waking dreams where she talks to her mother, and becomes increasingly convinced she is still alive. The grieving husband and daughter must join together to search for Billie, uncovering long-buried secrets along the way.

Robert "Bud" Roper is the respected author of serious nonfiction books like "Now the Drum of War," about Walt Whitman in the Civil War, and "Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita."

He also wrote a mystery set in Berkeley that not only features a Cal professor but makes fun of academic politics and Berkeley’s obsession with food. (There are scenes set in Berkeley Bowl and Chez Panisse).

In "The Savage Professor," the well-regarded UCSF epidemiologist Anthony Landau returns to his Berkeley Hills home to find a naked woman dead in his bed.

She is a former scientific colleague and lover with whom he recently had a public falling out. Soon, other bodies are discovered in places Landau frequents: under his house and in the backseat of his car.

The campus is terrified, the press is calling for answers and the world is certain it has a serial killer on the loose. Is Landau being framed? Or is he doing the killing?

Susan Dunlap wrote 10 mysteries featuring Berkeley homicide detective Jill Smith from 1981 to 2002. "As A Favor" is the second in the series but the first one explicitly set in Berkeley.

As the book opens, Smith is in plain clothes hiding in People’s Park. She is investigating who stripped a Berkeley patrol car of its hubcaps, fender and antenna.

But then Nat, her ex-husband, calls, asking a favor: Can she look into the disappearance of his new girlfriend — but do it off the books?

Jill drives to the girlfriend’s house where the back door is ajar, the living room a mess and blood is everywhere. And Nat’s pewter pen is prominent. Jill is over her ex, but is she ready to accuse him of murder?

"Death of a Dad," the first installment of the two-part Nursery School Murders, opens with the discovery of the father of a preschooler dead on a table at the nursery.

Assistant teacher Maren Matthews investigates, but is dismayed when it looks like head teacher Judy may be involved.

When two more people are killed, Maren — a gloomy clown turned porno actor, and a mom with a double life — has to look into the nursery school’s moms and dads.

The Volvo-driving, Democratic-leaning parents are not as wholesome as they seem.

In this eco-noir, corporate greed clashes with community values as a national waste conglomerate attempts a hostile takeover of a beloved Berkeley recycling collective, Recycle Berkeley, known as ReBe.

When a body turns up crushed in a bale of aluminum, Brian Hunter, a bookkeeper who is trying to prove himself as a journalist for an alternative paper, investigates his friend Doug’s murder.

But then he falls for Barb, Doug’s former lover, now a suspect in the murder.

Trash, politics and environmentalism form a tangled web.

In the only true crime book on our list, "Shallow Grave in Trinity County," former Mercury News journalist Harry Farrell reconstructs the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Bryan, a Berkeley teenager whose walk home from school — along a shortcut behind the Claremont Hotel — ended in her disappearance.

For three months, police searched unsuccessfully for Stephanie or her body, but found nothing.

Then the wife of 27-year-old college student Burton Abbott found a purse with Stephanie’s ID, along with muddied undergarments, hidden in their basement.

Stephanie’s remains were later recovered in a shallow grave near Abbott’s remote mountain cabin in Trinity County.

Farrell attended Abbott’s trial in 1955. Abbott was convicted and executed in the gas chamber after just over a year on death row. Stephanie’s father died of a heart attack two years after her murder.