Peter Sharp Legal Mysteries

The Court appoints attorney Peter Sharp to defend a man accused of capital murder, but there are just a few things that might make this defense a little more difficult than others, because the client's crime was captured on security cameras, he freely confessed to the crime, he wants to plead guilty at his arraignment, and he refuses to talk to Peter Sharp, the attorney whose appointment he agreed to...but aside from those minor problems, it's just another criminal defense case where Sharp must avoid being humiliated in court by his ex-wife....

It's tough enough defending innocent people, but attorney Peter Sharp's new client has a reputation for disliking any person of color, and is then arrested with a smoking gun, standing over the body of a dead black man he had recently been seen arguing with.

There are many types of mysteries, but one stands out over all the others: the ones involving a locked room. Over the years, every mystery writer worth his salt has tried to come up with the one that tops all the rest: the secret compartments, the doors locked from the inside, the confused timeline, etc. Jacques Futrelle set the standard with his Problem in Cell 13 but there hasn't been a really fine stumper since then. Until now.

There are many types of mysteries, but one specific group stands apart from all the others: those involving a locked room in which a dead body is found...a room that would have been impossible for any person to have entered, committed the murder, and left - because of locked doors, locked windows, or other security devices making the entry and exit impossible.

In An Element of Peril, the 10th Peter Sharp legal mystery, Peter faces a unique triple task: First, he must defend a domestic servant who has been charged with the chainsaw-killing of her boss; second, if he can get the servant acquitted, he must then defend the insurance company from being forced to pay a five-million-dollar life insurance policy on the boss's life by proving that she was not murdered and is still alive; and third, he must discover how the alleged corpse of the servant's boss disappeared.

In this 11th adventure of the 20 Peter Sharp and Suzi B. mysteries, due to a conflict of interest between the county and the defendant, attorney Peter Sharp is asked by the district attorney's office to step in and act as special prosecutor in a criminal case of first degree murder.

More than half way back from Catalina Island on his boat, a man makes a ship-to-shore S.O.S. radio call to the Marina del Rey Coast Guard, but before he can describe his emergency, a gun is heard being fired on his boat and the transmission ends. When a crew lowered from the Coast Guard helicopter board his boat and find his body, there is no other person on the boat... and no way that any other person could have boarded his boat going 30 miles an hour, and gotten away from the speeding boat.

Peter Sharp's privacy has been invaded: someone knows that he is a devout fan of mysteries, especially those featuring Sherlock Holmes...and some events take place that have elements coinciding with the names and occurrences in the Holmes stories.