THE BROKEN DOLL MURDERS Two mothers demand investigation of what they perceive is corruption in their schools. They feel that the politicians are stealing enough money to compromise the schools' viability. A subsequent state investigation of local school construction contracts agrees. The state freezes all contracts of the local family owned construction-company, which is now threatened with bankruptcy. This impoverishes both the free spending manager of the company and his gambler brother in law. The former, over his head in the stock market, decides on a fake kidnapping of his little daughter in order to extract enough money from his wealthy father-in-law to save his company. But, the wealthy patriarch of the family is injured during the kidnapping and is unavailable to provide ransom money or to rescue his ner-do-well son from the menace of the gamblers demanding payment of his debts. So, the son, in order to escape gamblers' threats, allies himself with a drug smuggler and uses his teen aged son to introduce narcotics into the local high school. Both schemes go catastrophically wrong. First, when the fake kidnapping turns into a real one and the kidnappers take the little girl to Mexico in order to escape federal authorities. The drug introduction plan is devastated, when a high school girl dies of a drug overdose. When the affluent father recovers from his injury, he refuses to part with with money demanded by the kidnappers or to rescue his son from the gamblers. He is subsequently murdered--poisoned with arsenic. A corrupt pharmacist and all family members are possible suspects. Police authorities are challenged to find the murderer or murderers and rescue the kidnapped child
About the Author: AUTHORS BIOGRAPHYS Frank W. Blaisdell is a graduate of Stanford University and StanfordUniversity Medical School. He is Professor of Surgery Emeritus, University of California Davis Medical School and former Chief of Surgery San Francisco General Hospital. He was the author of more than 400 publications, books and book chapters, including the two predecessors of this mystery novel, namely-Death in the Operating Roomand Burn Em Black Murders. Molly Blaisdell is a graduate of San Francisco State University. She entered into a publicity career starting at the St. Francis Hotel and thenhas served many other prominent San Francisco hotels including the Hilton Union Square, Hyatt Regency and the Stanford Court Hotelas well as international hotels such as Pan Pacific and the Pacific Island of Palau. One of her best known clients has been the prison of Alcatraz. She is also a travel producer for National Public Radio and author of Her Journey To 50. She is a member of Society of American Travel Writers and Bay Area Travel Writers.