Karen Kijewski: Kat's Cradle

From the Publisher:
She's a hard-boiled Sacramento P.I. with a soft  spot for the unlucky, the unloved, and one special  cop named Hank. Her name is Kat Colorado and in  her line of business curiosity can be mre than an  occupational hazard -- it can be  murder.

She said her name was Paige Morrell and she  came to Kat Colorado hoping to untangle the twisted  mystery of her past. She was a  twenty-one-year-old "orphan," a poor little rich girl on  the verge of inheriting a weathy old river estate --  and some very nasty surprises. But when Kat set  out to solve the case, she found herself following  a thread of lies, greed and deceit that led  straight to the corpse of a key source to Paige's past.  Now the Sacramento private eye was about to learn  that in the California Delta some family secrets  were better left buried... because uncovering  them could be murder.

Karen Kijewski: Kat's Cradle. Crimeline, ISBN: 0553293915 (January, 1997), 320 p., $6.99