Miranda "Munch" Mancini, a single mom and mechanic, seeks out a killer dredging up her past after her fingerprints and picture turn up in a murdered woman's arrest file, as she must lure the murderer out or face the consequences of her past. Munch Mancini's past catches up with her in this sixth adventure featuring the reformed bad girl turned garage mechanic and single mother--a series that's gaining fans with every new outing for a good reason--Munch is an authentically original creation with grit, wit, and determination, which often serve her better than her loyalty to old friends. Now one of those friends turns up murdered, and when homicide Detective Mace St. John finds Munch's prints and photo on the corpse's records, a bloody part of her past threatens to blow Munch and her daughter's future away. If that's not enough, the teenage son of another old friend turns up on Munch's doorstep, but of course it's no coincidence. By the time Sernaella ties a boy named Bug, a drug-fueled murder spree the cops have long since closed the books on, and a dead woman in a storm drain together in a fast-placed plot, she's brought another piece of Munch's history into sharper focus, making her hard-fought struggle to turn her life around even more interesting, involving, and inspiring. --Jane Adams Successful mechanic and loving mom Munch Mancini hopes that she's finally left her checkered past behind, but her past proves once again that it's not quite through with her. When an analysis of a murdered woman's fingerprints yields a mug shot of Munch, she is forced to confess to her confidantes on the police force that she once posed as the dead woman, Jane Ferrar, to weasel out of a drunk-driving charge. What she doesn't say is that she and Jane were involved, once upon a time, in something much more serious, and that something probably led to Jane's death. As more friends and foes from her drugs-and-drinking days resurface, Munch is faced with a choice between keeping quiet or revealing secrets that could ruin everything she's worked so hard to accomplish. Seranella's sixth Mancini novel provides some valuable backstory and promises more misadventure to come for her flawed but appealing heroine. Carrie Bissey Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved George P. Pelecanos Author of Soul Circus and Hell to Pay Barbara Seranella is a writer's writer who has lived a life and is unafraid to tell the tale. Unpaid Dues is honest, hard-hitting, exciting crime fiction. Give this a try. -- Review Barbara Seranella was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Pacific Palisades. After running away from home at fourteen, joining a hippie commune in the Haight, and riding with outlaw motorcycle clubs, she decided to do something normal, so she became a mechanic. Her Munch Mancini novels are No Man Standing; Unfinished Business, a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of 2001"; Unwanted Company; No Human Involved; and No Offense Intended. She and her husband, Ron, and their dogs divide their time between Laguna Beach and La Quinta, California. Her Web site is www.barbaraseranella.com Chapter One The sixty-two-year-old groundskeeper of the exclusive Riviera Country Club spotted the bodies at first light. The corpses huddled against each other at the bottom of the concrete storm channel just before it disappeared downstream beneath the golf course. Wide enough to drive through, the storm channel had offered many surprises in the past -- hubcaps, beach chairs, the broken shafts of misbehaving seven-irons -- but never anything so horrific. Hector Granados had been hoping for treasure this Monday morning, especially after the heavy winter rain the previous weekend. Golf games had been canceled and the typically barren storm drain that ran beneath the course had turned into a raging torrent. This amount of water, he knew, was capable of carrying and then depositing a vast range of large, sometimes valuable refuse. At first he thought it was a bundle of clothing, then he saw the hands. The larger body, the female, clutched a baby to her bosom. He looked for a long time, and the baby never moved. Its little hand reached out stiffly from beneath a blanket. The slow-moving current carried a branch. It tangled with the woman's hair, causing her head to pull back. The gaping wound in her throat opened into a grotesque and silent scream. Her eyelids were purple and protruded from her face like two medallions of raw liver, and a small stream of foamy pink bubbles trickled from her lifeless mouth. "Oh my God," he said first in English, then several more times in his native Spanish. He used his two-way radio to contact the clubhouse. "The police," he told Pat, the starter. "We need the police." "What's wrong?" Pat asked. "It's terrible," he sobbed. "Dios mÍo." "What?" "Bodies, two of them," Hector said, his breath short as if he had been running. "In the canal. Ay, pobrecito bebé." "Oh, shit," Pat said, "I jus