Unwanted Company

Description

Miranda "Munch" Mancini has seen the worst of times, but she's still looking for the best. A recovering addict and auto mechanic, she's now a single mother and a fledgling businesswoman trying to run a limousine service. But being her own boss means she can't afford to turn down a client, even when a seedy government type offers her big money to drive around a foreign businessman...

The problems start when Munch promises to hire Ellen, an old friend fresh out of prison, as a driver. Next thing Munch knows, though, her friend, her client, and her Cadillac are missing in action, and the police are at her door.

With the custody of her adoptive daughter on the line and Ellen's life in Jeopardy, there's nothing Munch won't do to help her pal, police detective Mace St. John, solve the case. But if there's a brutal murderer on her trail, what can Munch do -- which won't get her killed -- to stop him?

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Just when things seem to be going relatively well for recovering addict, ex-prostitute, ex-con, and whiz-bang auto-mechanic-cum-limo-service-magnate Miranda "Munch" Mancini and her 6-year-old adopted daughter, Asia, she encounters a world of good-intentioned hurt from an old druggie friend, Ellen. Fresh out of prison and just 16 days sober, Ellen is determined to get her life back on track. When things on the outside don't go according to plan, she turns to Munch, who does the right thing by offering Ellen a couch to sleep on and a part-time job as a limo driver. Before you can say "That Ellen, she's going to be trouble," that Ellen becomes trouble when she drives Victor, a Romanian diplomat with a taste for the seedier side of Western life, and Raleigh, a misogynistic and unscrupulous CIA agent, to Tijuana. And, naturally, she doesn't tell Munch.

Serial murder, mayhem, and numerous foreign and domestic intrigues follow in Unwanted Company, ex-mechanic Barbara Seranella's fast-paced third novel. Like No Human Involved and No Offense Intended, it features a cast of well-defined if invariably impaired characters, including Munch's refreshingly normal--that is to say, normally troubled without being psychologically tortured--pal Detective Mace St. John and his partner, the self-doubting Detective Cassiletti. Stylish, spare, and finely tuned, Unwanted Company is an early entry in what promises to be a long and happy run for Barbara Seranella (certainly) and Munch Mancini (please). --Michael Hudson

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Unfinished Business : A Munch Mancini Crime Novel

Description

Munch Mancini finally has her life together and she's now a respectable mum with a regular job. By day, Munch is one of the Brentwood Texaco's best mechanics. By night, she drives a limo. As she waits outside a charity gala two guests leave arguing and Munch senses a threat. Soon one of her customers will be murdered, another will be raped and tortured, and Munch will find herself trapped in the mayhem. Which brings her to Mace St. John, the cop who arrested her back in her biker days. Now they are friends, but Munch sometimes yearns for more. All is tested when they're thrown together in the hunt for a killer. A riveting novel!

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Miranda "Munch" Mancini is quite a woman. She's a recovering drug and alcohol abuser; she's a southern California auto mechanic; she's the sole proprietor of a fledgling limo service; she's a loving mother to her 7-year-old adopted daughter, Asia. Set in the early 1980s, Barbara Seranella's fourth Mancini novel, Unfinished Business, has Munch and her friend, detective Mace St. John, in hot pursuit of a serial rapist-murderer who's killed one of her clients, the socialite Diane Bergman, and raped another, the actress Robin Davies. Worse--for all concerned, including the rapist--the rapist has come close enough to Munch's daughter to pin a note to her coat, and now Munch is getting threatening calls:

The phone rang again. Asia reached for it.

"No," Munch said, with more force than she had intended. Asia jumped back. Munch picked up the receiver, tried to give Asia a comforting smile, and said "Hello?"

"You have a nice house," the strangely distorted voice said. It vibrated, sounding like the voice of that robot in that old television show Lost in Space. The cadence was slow, as if the speaker needed an extra moment to prepare each word. "But you really shouldn't take the same route home every day."

Gritty, creepy in the extreme, and at times positively harrowing, Unfinished Business is a most welcome entry into the Mancini line (No Human Involved, No Offense Intended, Unwanted Company). Seranella's characters are wholly yet finely drawn, their dialogue is true, and the mounting urgency she packs into this novel's pace, particularly down the home stretch, is palpable. --Michael Hudson

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Unwilling Accomplice: A Munch Mancini Crime Novel (Munch Mancini Novels)

Description

Munch Mancini and little daughter Asia are doing just fine. Munch rejoices in her job as an auto mechanic at the Brentwood Texaco. She and Asia have a house -- not in tony Brentwood -- and a dog, and Munch has been off drugs for years. She plans to stay that way. It's tough, though, when people from her old life resurface.

Such a person is Lisa Slokum, Asia's aunt. Lisa has always meant trouble, and why should now be any different? It seems she has bolted from the Witness Protection Program with her two daughters, fifteen-year-old Charlotte and eleven-year-old Jill, and she needs Munch's help.

Would that it were so simple. Munch will need to call upon Rico Chacón, a fine cop but not-so-fine boyfriend whose commitment to her on the nonprofessional side seems to be wavering. And before Munch can sort out her love life she must try on the role of auntie to Asia's new cousins -- not easy when the teenaged Charlotte goes missing and her mom, Lisa, lands in jail.

Why did Charlotte run away, and where is she now? Is she in danger of becoming one of Hollywood's lost street children? Does she have information about the recent death of school friend Steven Koon? And why was a lock of her hair found stuck to a piece of duct tape in a ransacked storage locker?

Munch must unravel the mystery of young Charlotte's complex life before it's too late to save her. To do that, she needs help from Rico, who's investigating the Koon boy's death. Will their professional alliance rekindle their romance? Should she take him back? Does he want to come back? Can she trust him?

With its pulsating suspense and penetrating look at family relationships and the universal need for love and affirmation, Unwilling Accomplice is the best yet from a versatile author whose passionate voice shines through her fast-moving prose.

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No Man Standing: A Munch Mancini Crime Novel

Description

Munch Mancini is a busy woman, juggling her job, a fledgling business and single motherhood, but she hasn't forgotten her old friends like Ellen Summers. Munch and Ellen were young and foolish together, but somewhere along the line Munch went straight and Ellen went to prison. Now Ellen is about to be freed from the California Institute for Women. She'll have another chance to make a life. Or will she? Just a day before her release, her world falls apart when someone tortures and murders her mother and stepfather. Ellen may be the next target. Friendship, loyalty, motherhood, men and even Munch's sobriety are put to the test as she embarks on a harrowing mission to catch a killer and save Ellen.

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Munch Mancini used to be a biker chick who was handy with a wrench but had a few bad habits like booze, drugs, and bad taste in men. The heroine of Barbara Seranella's lively, engaging series of mysteries, Munch is trying to clean up her new life as a solid citizen and single mother by staying away from the temptations of her old one. But when her closest friend, Ellen, gets out of jail and learns just how badly someone wants the money she took from a man who tried to kill her, Munch can't turn her away. It's not like Munch doesn't have her own problems: she's being stalked by the mother of one of her daughter Asia's playmates, trying to resuscitate her moribund limousine business, and in the middle of moving into the first house she's ever owned. And now she's got a sullen stripper on her bad side, counterfeit money in her kid's toy box, a new lover who's also a cop, and a very strange guy who says he's her friend's father but might also be a killer who's staying one step ahead of every move she makes. This entertaining and well-crafted thriller should earn this highly original writer (Unfinished Business, Unwanted Company) a host of new fans. --Jane Adams

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No Offense Intended

Description

Former druggie and alcoholic, Munch Mancini, is working as an auto mechanic and attending meetings at Alcoholics Anonymous when former lover "Sleaze" John pays a visit to ask a favor. She tries to stay out of trouble, but this "friend" from the past draws her into temptation and makes her a person of interest in several murders.

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Barbara Seranella's Munch Mancini--a 1970s ex-druggie and jailbird wrestling with her self-esteem and her future--was a blast of original air in the first book about her, No Human Involved. The only problem was that there seemed to be no way she could be as interesting or edgy ever again. Happily, it turns out that Seranella, a longtime car mechanic to the rich and famous of Los Angeles, is even better at tinkering with a word processor. No Offense Intended shows us a growing and changing Munch, while avoiding most of the traps that second books of a series can fall into.

It must have been tempting, for example, to have Munch team up again with Lt. Mace St. John, the thorny but eventually very sympathetic cop who helped her in the first book. But that would have diminished both her fragility and inventiveness, giving her someone too solid to lean on. Instead, we find Munch on her own when an ex-lover rolls into Happy Jack's Auto Repair in the San Fernando Valley to ask her to look after his baby daughter. And when that lover is found dead on the San Diego Freeway, mixed up in a biker gang's dangerous arms dealings, Munch does much of the dirty work on her own before linking up with a LAPD homicide detective.

Equally inventive is the natural way Seranella uses Munch's car repair skills to give the character depth and move the story along without making too much of it. Locked up in jail and needing to smoke and make a phone call, Munch persuades a reluctant guard to loosen up by telling her how to fix the ignition on her '67 Camaro Super Sport. The explanation is so wonderfully authoritative that the page (158) should be copied by anyone who owns that car. As for the rest of this moving and exciting book, you'll be passing it around a lot, as well. --Dick Adler

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An Unacceptable Death (Munch Mancini Novels)

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