What do you get when you mix big oil, big money and big greed? You get the quintessential Santa Barbara mystery, of course.

J.F. Freedman is a master when it comes to weaving tight plots, full of unexpected twists and turns. House of Smoke is no exception. Here we meet retired cop Kate Blanchard, who, like so many of us, has moved to Santa Barbara to start over.

Blanchard fled her job and her life as an Oakland police officer after a botched hostage crisis. She is also running from her estranged daughters, her abusive husband, and herself. Falling back on the only thing she feels she knows, she becomes a private investigator in hopes that routine investigative work will bring her some sense of normalcy.

Her first really big case comes from the daughter of the wealthiest, most powerful family in town, who believes that her boyfriend did not commit suicide in the Santa Barbara jail, but was in fact murdered. Her investigation reveals that there is more to the case than meets the eye, and when Blanchard concludes the boyfriend’s death was indeed a murder, she tries to back away, telling her client she has provided the answer to the original question.

But after Blanchard is threatened by an apparent drug kingpin and his thugs, she picks up the case again, compelled to find the truth, no matter the cost. As the case is peeled away, layer by layer, it leaves her in mortal danger. Who can be trusted? The sheriff who provides covert assistance? Her ex-cop friend? The client’s family? The client herself? No one? The plot thickens when big oil comes to town with an environmentally sensitive proposal that is almost too good to be true. How does the industry’s presence in town tie into the mystery?

House of Smoke is very much a story of the Santa Barbara coast. Freedman makes liberal, effective use of Santa Barbara’s unique locations as well as her politics to weave a taught, suspenseful story as full of twists as our back country roads. Tie a knot and hang on.