Monica's Sister — Earl Emerson

In the thirteenth installment of this award-winning private eye series, Seattle sleuth Thomas Black agrees to do a favor for a longtime friend of Kathy's, Angela Bassman, who quickly gets him entangled in a messy relationship between philandering billionaire, Clark Lloyd Self and his famous ex-model wife, Monica Pennington. Complications ensue when Self's gargantuan Rhodes-scholar bodyguard and his sniggering buddy begin harassing Black and Angela. When Angela ends up dead, her sister hires Black to investigate her last weeks, sending Black on a Byzantine odyssey in which he nearly loses his life and ends up discovering more about each sister's mysterious past than either of them ever wanted him to know.