Hemingway's Suitcase

Dr. Lyle Fields is having a bad day. A once-renowned Hemingway scholar desperate for recognition, he's lost his wife, his reputation and teeters on losing his livelihood as a Stanford professor when a former star pupil waltzes through his office door. Clarissa Daugherty is more than a vision of loveliness. She has found the holy grail of his years of research: a long lost, possibly apocryphal suitcase containing the young Hemingway's unpublished first novel. One tiny problem: her sometimes boyfriend passed the suitcase on to a greedy Beverly Hills literary agent who promised to turn the novel into a movie ... and now he's gone missing. The chase is on, from Stanford to Hollywood to a freaky Big Sur rehab clinic, a palatial Carmel Valley winery, and a mysterious hilltop manse overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Along the way, Professor Fields strikes a strange alliance with an offbeat homicide detective and a moody ferret that shows up at the most inopportune moments ... usually along with a corpse or two.