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• Excerpt: And Then Put Out the Light
• Excerpt: Still Life with Devils

Deborah Grabien can claim a long personal acquaintance with the fleshpots—and quiet little towns—of Europe. She has lived, and worked and hung out, from London to Geneva to Paris to Florence and a few stops in between.

But home is where the heart is. Since her first look at the Bay Area, as a teenager during the peak of the City’s Haight-Ashbury years, she’s always come home to San Francisco, and in 1981, after spending some years in Europe, she came back to Northern California to stay.

Born in 1954, Deborah was deeply involved in the Bay Area music scene from the end of the Haight-Ashbury heyday until the mid-1970s. Most of her friends have been trying to get her to write about those years—fictionalized, of course! —and, now that she’s comfortable with it, she’s doing just that (watch this page for updates). After publishing four novels between 1989 and 1993, she took a decade away from writing to really learn how to cook. That done, she picked up where she’d left off, with the five novels of her Haunted Ballads series being brought out by St. Martins Minotaur between 2003 and 2007.

Deborah’s been happily married to Nicholas Grabien since 1983. A San Francisco native and another member of the local music scene in its heyday, Nic is a bassist, while Deborah plays guitar. They share a passion for rescuing cats and finding them homes, and are both active members of several local feral cat rescue organisations. Deborah has a grown daughter, Joanna, who lives in New York.

These days, in between cat rescues and cookery, Deborah can generally be found listening to music, playing music on one of her eleven guitars, hanging out with her musician friends, or writing fiction that deals with music, insofar as multiple sclerosis—she was diagnosed in 2002—will allow. To learn more about Deborah, visit her website at www.deborahgrabien.com.

And Then Put Out the Light

And Then Put Out the Light explores identity, individuality, freedom; the ties of home, family, and expectation; and what it means to be a woman.

Emily Moon-Bourne defines herself by the alienated people who ought to be part of her life. She is the daughter of a Swedish, alcoholic mother and a Native American father who disappeared frequently and for long periods throughout her childhood. She’s the ex-wife of a successful attorney who cheated on her with a woman almost half his age. She’s a woman who not only listens to but also names the vituperative voice in her head. She’s a sculptor who only creates representations of things that fly, and wonders about the anonymous buyer of one of her most disturbing pieces, a malevolent wasp.

After her divorce, Emily decides to travel. From her starting point in the U.S. and on through England, France, and Italy, she meets women who are also on a journey of discovery, each pointing to new directions, new insights, and each helping her to uncover the secrets she has hidden from herself.

At the same time, everywhere she goes she catches glimpses of a man who seems to be waiting for her. His name is Martin, and he is a secret, one she is determined to know as well as she is coming to know herself.

Reviews: Andrea’s, Elisa’s, Theresa’s

Still Life with Devils

In the city of San Francisco, it’s mid-October, darkness comes early, and a killer who strangles pregnant women is just claiming victim number six.

Homicide chief Cassy Chant is running the manhunt for the serial killer the cops call Captain Nemo. The team, including Cassy’s right-hand man Detective Inspector Jim Delgado, have been hunting Nemo for nearly ten weeks.

Nemo’s getting more brazen with every death. The cops are exhausted, the public is scared, the press and City Hall are getting shrill. To add to Cassy’s worries, half his department is down with the flu.

The seventh murder, done in broad daylight, has a witness. Homicide’s staff artist is out with the flu, and Cassy asks his sister Leo, a well-known painter, to do the Identikit sketches from the old man’s description.

Leo Chant has a unique, and secret, talent: the ability to walk into her own paintings. As she sketches, she realizes that, though she can’t remember why or when, she’s drawn this face before.

Nemo gets more careless with every killing. The first break in the case comes when the Chinatown witness remembers a single fact that may point them in the right direction: the killer’s warped fascination with feng shui, the Chinese art of geomancy.

When Nemo attacks a friend of Leo’s, she decides to use her secret talent to identify the killer. But painting Nemo’s world and walking into it could be more dangerous than Leo realizes, because Nemo may not be what he seems. And the confrontation, explosive and dangerous, may mean this painting is a trap Leo can’t walk back out of.

Reviews: Publisher’s Weekly