title: Death in North Beach (Carly Paladino & Noah Lang)
author:  Ronald Tierney 
description: San Francisco PIs Carly Paladino and Noah Lang, who teamed in Tierney's <i>Death in Pacific Heights</i> (2009), try to solve the murder of aging novelist Whitney Warfield, ironically slain by a fountain pen, in this lackluster follow-up. Gigolo William Blake, who was seen arguing with Warfield the night the writer was killed, hires Paladino and Lang to clear his name. Blake provides a list of 12 people who might have feared the revelations Warfield planned to make in a tell-all book, including, besides Warfield's son, wife, and mistress, a number of artistic types with ties to North Beach's beat past. Alibis and unnatural deaths narrow the suspect list. In the end, Paladino orchestrates a clumsy and contrived showdown of suspects and police in a restaurant back room to expose the guilty. Tierney makes good use of North Beach's rich history, but it's not enough to redeem this pedestrian effort. <i>(Feb.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Chapter 1
   
  Carly jammed her ski edges into the side of the mountain to execute a ‘hockey stop.’ Snow
  cover was dicey this early in the season—heck, the Challenger area had only been open a handful of
  days so far in November—and the 22-mph wind was blowing straight up the mountain as if intent on
  blowing what snow there was, clear off the mountain.
  The call had come over the radio only two minutes ago. She’d been closest, but she didn’t
  have the AED—a machine that deciphered a heart’s rhythm and delivered a shock if needed. It would
  be another two minutes until the other patrollers arrived with the AED and the sled. If the man was
  truly having a cardiac arrest as reported, brain damage could set in after only four minutes.
  She stepped on the back of her bindings to release her boots from her skis. She yanked off her
  gloves and clipped them to an o-ring on her harness. Then she dropped to her knees next to a slight
  woman who was performing chest compressions on an older male. Her form w