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Mayor Anthony Podesta is keenly aware there will be a fight the minute he announces the razing of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and the restoration plus reunification of Hetch Hetchy Valley to Yosemite National Park and the Department of the Interior. The battle will not be so much as destroying a reservoir providing the San Francisco Bay Area of its pure glacial snow melt water supply, but with the General Manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. And why is that? It seems the PUC GM has a relation there who’s been buried beneath 300 feet of water for over 200 years.

And what’s Chalmers’ interest in all this anyway? Has it anything to do with why his mansion is cantilevered over the cliffs of the exclusive neighborhood Sea Cliff and has sea water pumped up from the Pacific Ocean feeding his desalinators? And what’s so disturbing to Chalmers’ about the water at Hetch Hetchy? Was he perhaps in the Hetch Hetchy Valley and something happened before the land was stripped away from Yosemite to build a reservoir for San Francisco? Is this even possible considering the reservoir was completed over 100 years ago?

Who is Chalmers anyway and why do people covet participation in his business ventures as if whistling in the graveyard while they pass in the dark. Chalmers will admit, when pressed, he is a descendant of the rulers of Moldavia and that his great-grandfather was the last reigning prince before fleeing an upheaval of the monarchy and sailing to the new world and San Francisco.

As The Mayor’s Dead title suggests people die in San Francisco as a result of Mayor Anthony Podesta’s decision. And if these deaths are in fact murders, who investigates? Is it homicide Inspector Jane St. Claire whose dalliance with the mayor dates back 20 years and already suspects the trail of evidence leads to San Francisco City Hall? Or is it Inspector Frank McQueen who Mayor Podesta defended in court and prevailed 20 years earlier when Officer McQueen at the time was charged with murder after killing several criminals robbing a liquor store at Chalmers’ behest. Was there mentioned that the prosecutor at the time of McQueen’s trial is the son of Congressional House Speaker Fiorella Pardini whose involvement in this cabal is anything but minor?

What a headache this must be for poor Mayor Anthony Podesta who must uncork a bottle of liquid hell just for a job whose primary function is opening the morning paper in Sacramento and seeking the governor’s name in the obituaries. Apparently, the risk-reward is acceptable to our protagonist who climbs aboard Chalmers’ roller-coaster and braces himself for the bodies which soon begin to amass in what euphemistically becomes “The Mayor’s Dead”.