Since 1977, mystery author Marsha Muller has steadily produced novels detailing the life of her series character, professional investigator Sharon McCone. Her current novel, The Ever-Running Man, is the 25th in the long-lived series that began with the first novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes.

I started reading the McCone books in the late 1970s, which dates me, I suppose. But it also speaks of the loyalties of Muller’s readers. We tend to stick around.

In the early years, McCone worked for All Souls Legal Cooperative and handled small cases with large results. As evidenced in her latest offering, McCone is now capable of handling the jet-set crowd. During the last 30 years, our intrepid lady private eye has discovered more about herself and her family than most people ever get the chance to do. Of course, her family has had a lot more secrets and turmoil than most families do.

In the novel before this one, Vanishing Point, Muller married her heroine off to Hy Ripinsky, a high-powered executive working with Renshaw and Kessell International, a security firm capable of providing protection for heads of state and probably small countries. That relationship is only one of things that come under fire during the current novel.

The book opens with a bang. Ripinsky visits McCone’s office with an offer to hire her to search for an elusive attacker who has plagued the security corporation for over two years. RKI has kept the incidents primarily out of the news rather than take a black eye about not being able to protect their own people. However, the “Ever-Running Man” – as they’ve taken to calling him because witnesses always described him as someone running from the scene of an explosion – has upped the ante by making even more blatant and destructive attempts on RKI holdings.

McCone is reluctant to take on the assignment. As she explains to her husband, an investigation like that is going to require some deep research into the backgrounds of all the corporate executives. Including her husband.

Ripinsky already admitted to having several skeletons in his personal closet. He’s been something of a bad boy, which is one of the reasons that McCone is interested in him. However, before her journey through this novel is finished, she has to ask herself if he’s told her all the truth.

Before McCone can even officially start the case, the building she’s in gets bombed. She escapes injury, but two people aren’t so lucky. The Ever-Running Man’s body count has gone up.

Over the years, in addition to heading up her own agency with several operatives, McCone has also gone high tech. Readers get to see a lot of that in action in this novel, and Muller delivers it in a way that is not dry and boring.