Author Penny Rudolph lives in Albuquerque but she is setting her newest murder mystery Thicker Than Blood here. Her website describes it:

In this latter-day Chinatown, recovering alcoholic Rachel Chavez wants only to stay sober and keep her newly inherited parking lot in Los Angeles financially afloat. But a water agency executive is killed by a hit-and-run driver and she spots the guilty car in her garage. And Rachel becomes tangled in the conniving cross-purposes of California water politics.

Rudolph quips that her old job with California’s largest water agency left her with "a taste for murder." The book was picked up by Poisoned Pen Press for release in April. This week's Publishers Lunch also reports that L.A. freelancer June Casagrande has sold Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite, "a humorous guide that explains the rules and gives permission to break them," to Penguin. And L.A. high school teacher L. Divine's debut young adult novel Drama High: Volume 1 has been sold to Amistad. It's about "a quick-witted, 15-year-old AP student being raised by her grandmother in Compton who is bussed to a predominately white high school in the South Bay...."