The California hills are filled with folly as one of Margaret Millar most beloved characters, Tom Aragon, a Mexican-American lawyer turned private investigator, looks into three very bizarre vanishings. One of her few reoccurring characters, Tom Aragon, ranks among Millar's best creations. A charming and competent young lawyer, Aragon finds himself navigating one entitled nest of vipers after another, let alone racial prejudice, in three of Millar's most unusual and humorous novels. In Ask For Me Tomorrow (1976) Gilda Decker needs a new bag, what with her second husband being suddenly crippled and her ex-husband hiding himself and his money somewhere in the hinterlands of Mexico. Gilda's recently retained lawyer, Tom Aragon, Mexican himself, is the best man for the job. But as Aragon digs deeper into her ex-husband's past the more dangerous his job becomes. Tom Aragon returns in The Murder of Miranda (1979), which sees Aragon on his most entertaining case yet, looking into the simultaneous disappearances of Miranda Shaw and Grady Keaton. Shaw, a recently widowed woman of fifty, was last seen with Keaton, a young lifeguard half her age that worked at the prestigious Penguin Beach Club. The clues come one stranger than the next in this often hilarious novel of folly among the California elite. No dragnet is large or small enough to find Cleo Jasper, the beautiful and missing young woman at the center of Mermaid (1982), Tom Aragon's third and final outing. Retained by the woman's doting brother, who will spare no expense to find his sister, Aragon soon realizes that he has once again found himself in over his head when Cleo's friend turns up dead amidst a sea of somewhat dubious suicide notes.
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