Sudden Exposure (Jill Smith Mystery)

Plot

Stripped of her rank as a police detective by a higher-up in the department, Jill is back on the beat again, working patrol. Her most recent assignment? Trying to stop the naked protesters running through the Berkeley hills, decrying the recent city ordinance against nudity. Flagging one of them down, she runs smack into Bryn Wiley - ex-Olympic diver, owner of a thriving neighborhood health club, and local legend. Bryn knows a cop when she sees one, and she distracts Jill from the matter at hand by immediately issuing a vandalism complaint. The likely suspect? Hostile sixties radical Sam Johnson. Along with his old grudges, Sam now has a competing gym of his own. And a $400,000 house in the hills next door to Bryn's that he's noisily renovating. But fellow neighbor Karl Pironnen - a reclusive loner with a passion for chess and large dogs - is not exactly a friend to the cops either. And there are all those angry nudists, streaking around au naturel. The stakes turn unexpectedly serious when someone is shot at close range. On the heels of her unearned demotion, Jill now must seek a murderer as bitter and burned out as she sometimes feels herself.