“Tomorrow we go down together. Your door, twenty past six.”
That’s Maria, who’s Sicilian and softens nothing and says I shouldn’t go down the hill by myself.
I live on Filbert, where the street gives up and turns into two hundred wooden stairs down the face of Telegraph Hill, and I’ve walked down them alone every morning since my divorce brought me home. A week ago there was a man dead on the third landing. He was on his back with his arms at his sides and his coat done up to the throat. Over him the parrots were having the argument they have every October, up in the high branches, furious about nothing. I have loved those birds since before anybody up here knew my name, and I wanted them to stop. I stood at the rail and waited to feel something the size of it. It didn’t come.
The police called it an accident before the coroner had him, and people do fall there. I’ve seen them fall, and they don’t land like that.
I said nothing, not standing over him and not when I came back up and found the scrap of paper still sitting where his head had been. I was afraid.
He’d spent years trying to buy three corners down the hill from me, which are espresso, shoes and prosciutto, and the families have had them since before I was born. Everyone at the counter knew who he was, and the question was what happens to those corners now. Nobody thought to ask about him, and I’d wanted him gone myself. I was ashamed.
So here is what my day looks like now.
I get up before it’s light and feed Burgess, my tabby, and then I crouch all the way down and put my forehead against his, which I’ve never told anybody I do. I make tea and sit in front of a wall of color-coded index cards, and I don’t write the book I’ve been working on about Dashiell Hammett. Sixteen months on the same chapter. My daughter says I don’t have a writing problem, I have a permission problem, and she said it with her suitcase open on my bed so I couldn’t argue.
My friend Maria comes for me with Pippo, her old greyhound, who has never gone anywhere she wasn’t going. Last night on her way out she stopped and pointed at my lock.
“Put the deadbolt on. You forget.”
I put it on. She’s right about me. I forget.
We go down together, and at that landing she keeps her eyes ahead and walks straight through it, and I look. I’ve looked every morning since.
I know what I saw. I haven’t said it out loud yet, and I’m beginning to think that’s the same problem as the book.
THE FILBERT STEPS
Series: A Telegraph Hill Mystery, Book 1
Genre: Literary Cozy Mystery
Release: August 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link
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.
Meet the author
Lila Blake writes the Telegraph Hill Mysteries, fair-play whodunits set in San Francisco’s North Beach, where the espresso is strong, the staircases are beautiful, and everybody knows everybody, which is the problem. THE FILBERT STEPS is the first of four; the second, THE YEAR OF THE GOAT, follows in October. She walks the real steps most mornings and believes no good book should end without a recipe. Find her at lilablake.com.