Marin County is famous for its affluent pleasures and the beauty of its beaches, mountains and redwood forests. In Time and Trouble, a teen-aged runaway, a yellow hearse, an insurance scam, a heart-shaped talisman, a baby’s skeleton in a meadow, and something ugly and odd going on in a Sausalito houseboat all converge there to provide the first—and nearly last—case for Billie August, the new hire of seasoned P.I. Emma Howe.

Billie, a single parent with no practical job skills, desperately needs the job, and Emma, whose personality has caused most of her employees to head for the hills, hires the sure-to-fail inexperienced young woman out of her own desperation. An unlikely, antagonistic pair, both find out that things are seldom as they seem, and appearances—in and out of crime and investigation—can be dangerously deceiving.