The Filbert Steps (The Telegraph Hill Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – California
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sutro House Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 31, 2026
Print length ‏ : ‎ 301 pages

Synopsis

A body on the steps. A neighborhood that saw nothing.

Vivian Salvatore came back to Telegraph Hill with a cat, a divorce settlement, and a  book she cannot seem to write.

At fifty-two, newly single and trying to rebuild her life, she has settled into the rhythms of San Francisco’s most beautiful staircase: coffee at the corner café, morning walks on the Filbert Steps, old neighbors on three corners, and the comforting illusion that everyone knows everyone.

Then, on a bright October morning, Vivian finds one of the city’s most ambitious developers dead on the third landing.

The police are ready to call it a fall. But Vivian spent twenty-seven years reading teenagers’ faces for a living, and she knows when a story does not fit. A coat buttoned wrong. A cigarette ground out where it should not be. Storefronts quietly sold to a post-office box in Delaware. And a neighborhood full of people who had reason to want one man gone.

As Vivian begins asking questions, she discovers that Telegraph Hill has been keeping secrets for years — about money, loyalty, grief, and who really gets to call a place home.

The Filbert Steps introduces Vivian Salvatore, a sharp-eyed, warm-hearted sleuth who notices everything and forgives almost as much.

Perfect for readers who love older women sleuths, atmospheric San Francisco mysteries, neighborhood secrets, found community, and fair-play cozy mysteries with literary depth.

Amazon

Excerpt

Bradford Loeb had eight days to live, and I spent the first of them worrying about a dog.

I didn’t know about the eight days. Nobody did, including Bradford Loeb, who that morning was somewhere across the city wanting things. What I knew was that it was the first Tuesday of October, that the fog would burn off by ten, and that my friend Maria’s old greyhound had been slow getting up the day before. On Telegraph Hill, that was the news.

I was up at five. I fed Burgess, my fourteen-year-old tabby, made tea, and stood at the kitchen window while the first container ship of the morning carried its lights out toward the Gate. Then I sat down at my desk, in front of the wall of index cards, and did not write my book about Dashiell Hammett.

I’d become very good at not writing it. Sixteen months on chapter four, and the cards were organized beautifully. Yellow for the people he knew, green for the addresses, blue for his cases, pink for the women, white for the questions I couldn’t answer. That last stack was the only one that had grown all year. Hammett had lived a mile from my window once, a sick ex-detective writing at a kitchen table at night, and put this city down on paper as it works: who owns it, who collects, who pays. I’d loved him since I was twenty-two, when a man in a secondhand shop sold me The Maltese Falcon for fifty cents because the cover was gone. Loved him through twenty-seven years of teaching him to teenagers at University High, through twenty-three years of marriage. Now I had the time, my desk, my wall of cards, and most mornings I sat in front of all of it and didn’t write. I had stopped asking myself why.

My book wasn’t a secret. Four of us still met one evening a week, the writers’ group that had outlived the City College workshop where we’d found each other seven years ago. We called ourselves the Fog & Quill. Nobody else was going to name us. We were each writing the history of our own corner of the city. Lola had the WPA muralists the city forgot to sign, and she ran our Tuesdays as completely as she ran her own kitchen. River had the Summer of Love and had been there for it, which she would tell you inside a minute. Nora had the fog-end of the Sunset, the drowned amusements out at the beach, and the worst and truest tongue of the four of us. And I had Hammett, whom I was not writing. The group had stopped asking about the chapter. They meant it kindly, and lately I had started to dislike it.

My daughter could have told me why. My daughter had, in fact.

The phone rang at six-forty, which is nine-forty in Connecticut.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweet.”

My daughter Margot calls most mornings, between her shower and her first class, from a dorm room where the radiator bangs and the roommate sleeps through it. Ninety seconds, sometimes five minutes. She gives me the first piece of her day, every day, and I have never told her what it does for me. If I told her, she’d have to know, and then it would be a duty.

“Are you eating? Don’t say coffee.”

“Maria feeds me on Sundays.”

“It’s Tuesday.” She let it go. I could hear a door behind her, other people’s voices, the life she’d built at nineteen moving around her. “How’s chapter four?”

“Chapter four is fine.”

“Mom.”

“Margot.”

“You know what I think.”

I did know. She’d told me in August, the last night of her visit, sitting on my bed with her suitcase open. You don’t have a writing problem. You have a permission problem. Then she’d zipped the suitcase.

“Go to class, sweet.”

“Eat something. Oh, and your deli is famous. Somebody’s posting videos of the slicing, and my roommate follows the account, and she has no idea I’m North Beach royalty. Hi, Burgess!” The greeting was shouted across three thousand miles. Then she was gone.

My apartment was very quiet. Burgess looked at me from the windowsill. I went over, crouched all the way down, and put my forehead against his. I have never told anyone I do that. He held still until I was done. Then I took my coat and went out to walk two hundred wooden steps down to a cup of coffee.

The long way. Nobody was waiting for me, and it is the most beautiful walk in San Francisco.

The Filbert Steps is the first book in the Telegraph Hill Mysteries by Lila Blake. It releases August 31, 2026, from Sutro House Press. Learn more at lilablake.com.

Author

Lila Blake writes San Francisco neighborhood mysteries about foggy stairways, old houses, found family, and the secrets people keep when a place begins to change. Her Telegraph Hill Mysteries begin with The Filbert Steps, a literary cozy mystery featuring Vivian Salvatore, a fifty-two-year-old former teacher rebuilding her life after divorce. Lila is published by Sutro House Press, an independent fiction imprint based in San Francisco.

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