Through Her Eyes: Maggie MacGowen

A call from her famous older sister, a famous activist, community doctor and infectious disease specialist, brings documentary film-maker Maggie MacGowen to L.A., too late.

Emily is near death and Maggie is caught in a tangle of Emily's radical past trying to make sense of the attack. She is helped in this by the detective with the runner's body and the cop's eyes, Mike Flint.

After a six month separation from Mike Flint Maggie is back in L.A. shooting a documentary. She stops in a seeding nighttime neighborhood and interviews Pisces, a fourteen-year-old prostitute.

Pisces gives Maggie a new twist on her documentary, but when Pisces is found dead Maggie finds herself, and Mike, involved in an old kidnapping case and a new series of murders.

Maggie and daughter Casey have moved to L.A. and have found a house with Flint and his son Michael.

Fifteen years ago, Mike had just made detective. His first homicide investigation was high profile--an off-duty cop shot during a hold-up--and there was pressure to get results. Though he claims the conviction was clean, police methods of 1979 do not look good in the light of post-Rodney King L.A. As the district attorney comes down on him, Maggie must choose between defending her lover and confronting the fact that he may not be as kind as she thought.

In 1979 Roy Frady was an over-achieving cop and part of the Four Horsemen with Mike Flint. His murder is still unsolved. Mike wants to close the case before his retirement and Maggie sees Frady as a potential subject for a documentary.

During the chaotic last act of the Vietnam War, three people tried to preserve the art from the French colonial museum in Da Nang. As Viet Cong forces overwhelmed the South Vietnamese, Bao Ngo, Khanh Nguyen, and Minh Tam sped south, in trucks laden with all the treasures of eighteen hundred years of Vietnamese history. Although one truck disappeared, those three made it to Saigon just as the Americans pulled out. Minh and Khanh escaped on the last helicopter, Minh waving goodbye to Bao, the cousin he expected he would never see again.

Decades later, Khanh is at home in Los Angeles when Bao reappears, gun in hand. He ransacks her house and disappears. Maggie MacGowen, documentary filmmaker, looks into the incident, interviewing Khanh and Minh, who disappear just after she turns off her camera. She presses on, determined to understand this decades-old mystery, no matter how dangerous the past might be. (source: Amazon.com)

A decade has passed since Maggie MacGowen s last investigation in the pages of Hornsby s award-winning noir series. Gritty and streetwise, yet compassionate, these mysteries appeal to America s current fascination with realistic crime stories. Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen has taken on many tough assignments over the years. However, when she discovers a note from her newly dead husband, Detective Mike Flint, urging her to take a fresh look at a decade-old unsolved case of a boy who went missing, she isn't sure that she's up to the challenge. But how does one say no to a dead man? Maggie seeks information from anyone who has a connection: a spoiled cop, an ex-con taxi dancer, the dead youth s gang set the hookers, the cons, the addicts, the homeless and the hopeless and the good and decent people among them who remain the foundation of a community always in transition, always under siege. The answers Maggie discovers aren't what she expects, nor is the sometimes deadly opposition from all sides. But she finds strength from her own resilience...and an acceptance of Mike s final decision.

Just a few hours before she is murdered, a foreign stranger claims she is a close relative of investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen. It is a truism that "it's a wise child who knows its father." The same can apply to a mother, since we must believe and take for granted as true what our family tells us about our own early years. But what if you "remember" places you've never been, speak a language you've never been taught? What if your nearest and dearest are all involved in a conspiracy to cover up your true origins? In The Paramour's Daughter, Maggie MacGowen is thrown into this parallel universe, trying to remember "the ghosts of comfort, fear, or love" from her earliest years. She must question everything she's ever known about herself and her life-and deal with a large cast of previously unknown blood relatives, some of whom may not have affectionate feelings for the little girl who vanished so long ago. Especially when large sums of euros are involved

When her TV series is abruptly canceled, investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen accepts a short-term contract to teach film production at a local community college and finds herself in the middle of an explosive power struggle. In an era of budget cuts, the community college President arouses faculty and student animosity with his expensive building program. When Maggie finds the college president hanging in the building's stairwell, suspicion falls on her young friend Sly Miller. A world-class artist, his sculpture was supposed to be hanging in place of the body. That's only the beginning of a twisty plot dealing with the aesthetics and business of art, a billion-dollar art-for-arms deal; political corruption and cronyism; and issues of art forgery and journalistic ethics, all capped off by a stunning denouement.

Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen learns the hard way that going home again can be deadly. While clearing out her deceased father's desk, Maggie discovers that he had locked away potential evidence in a brutal unsolved murder 30 years earlier. When she begins to ask questions of family and old friends, it emerges that there are people in that seemingly tranquil multi-ethnic Berkeley neighborhood who will go to lethal lengths to prevent the truth from coming out. With the help of her new love, Jean-Paul Bernard, Maggie uncovers secrets about the murdered Vietnamese mother of a good friend and learns how the crime affected--and continues to affect--the still close-knit neighborhood. The more she finds out, the greater the threat of violence becomes, not only for the long-time neighborhood residents, but even for Maggie herself.