Joan Del Monte

Mud Blood
by Joan Del Monte

Fiction, mystery, amateur sleuth, set in the California Sacramento Delta and the Venice canals of California.


A criminal lawyer, FULTON YEE, disappears, and the search for him is no place for a lady, But unconventional mystery writer VERA MOONACHIE has to find him, because he is churning his files of nasty crimes for her plot and he has the solution to her current mystery.

From the moment she starts her search, Vera is confronted with a hornets nest of fragile egos, including Fulton's trio of feuding ex-lovers. We meet Nancy Branscomb, an editor Fulton met years before when he visited her family's cabin in the Sacramento Delta. We meet Florence Loring, a real estate agent with a past so colorful that she met Fulton when he was defending her in court. And we meet Emma Sawtooth, a haystack-shaped earth mother who runs a writer's group. Vera encounters an authorship dispute based on a notebook. And when Vera picks up that notebook, she picks up the deadliest kind of enemies--people with something to hide.

Looking for a solution to this seemingly pointless disappearance, Vera embarks on a harrowing journey to the storied Sacramento Delta, a place which seems caught in a time warp. She discovers an old land contract with the resident Chinese community, which is in the way of a major land development. And events take a weird turn on the mud bottom of a Delta slough.

And then someone tries to kill Vera. Old agreements can be murder.


Joan Del Monte was a featured author at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. in September 2007. She is also a multi-faceted woman, and has owned an antique shop, a real estate agency, and art gallery in Venice. She taught courses in antiques at UCLA extension and the California State College system; lectured on antiques on radio and wrote a bibliography of small antiques for the Los Angeles Public Library.

Joan taught a course in writing the mystery novel at Santa Monica College, which she called “A Guide to the Pitfalls, From Someone Who Has Fallen Into Most of Them”. She sold the movie rights to her first mystery “Magic Angel Ate a Pickle” and has a B.S. from Columbia University and an M.A. from U.C.L.A. She is a frequent public speaker on her books and the writer’s life.

She has two books in print: “PLONK GOES THE WEASEL,” takes place in a small redwood town. A film company has ripped them off and the residents go on a dogged hunt for unthinkable and truly wicked revenge. The second novel “DEATH HAD A YELLOW THUMB,” deals with the counterfeiting of saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, and is set in San Pedro, California and features a vagabond spice, missing ships and murder.

Joan currently lives on the Venice Canals in Southern California and summers in the Northern California redwoods.

A fourth novel is underway.