Filbert Steps
by Lila Blake
One of my favorite things about Lila Blakes new novel, Filbert Steps is the fact that her sleuth is a mature woman. After you read her guest post, Why I Gave My Amateur Sleuth a Life at Fifty-Two, you will know why. As part of this Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour, the author is offering a giveaway for a chance at a $25 Amazon gift card and a paperback edition of the book. So after you learn about Filbert Steps, make sure you enter the Giveaway at the end of the post.
Why I Gave My Amateur Sleuth a Life at Fifty-Two
A guest post By Lila BlakeVivian Salvatore did not arrive in my imagination as a young woman waiting for her real life to begin. She arrived at fifty-two, with a grown daughter, a finished marriage, a fourteen-year-old cat, and a book about Dashiell Hammett she had spent sixteen months not writing.
That was exactly the point.
I am fifty-two, too, which is part of why Vivian’s age mattered to me. I did not want to write midlife from the outside or treat it as a problem she had to overcome. I wanted a heroine my age at the center of the action: still changing, still ambitious, still capable of surprise, and carrying enough lived experience to recognize when a room is lying to her.
There is a particular kind of suspense in middle age that has nothing to do with whether life is over. It comes from realizing that the structure you spent decades building can disappear while you are still very much inside your own story. A marriage ends. A child leaves for college. A professional identity changes. Suddenly the future is open again, but it does not look like the open future of twenty-five. It comes with history, habits, grief, competence, and a much lower tolerance for nonsense.
I wanted Vivian to begin The Filbert Steps in that unsettled place. She has returned to a neighborhood that knew her before she was a wife, but returning is not the same as belonging. She has an apartment overlooking the Bay and a daily route down the Filbert Steps. She has coffee at the same window table. She has people who would feed her without being asked. Still, she has made her life deliberately small. Small feels manageable. Small does not demand that she decide what comes next.
Then she finds a body.
Vivian’s usefulness as an amateur sleuth comes from the life she has already lived. She taught literature to teenagers for twenty-seven years. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom knows how much information enters before a student speaks: the bag set down too carefully, the glance toward a friend, the joke delivered a little too quickly, the sudden interest in a page no one was reading. Vivian has trained herself to notice what people hope will pass without comment.
She also understands institutions. For years she was married to the head of a private school, which taught her how power behaves in polite rooms. She knows the difference between kindness and performance. She has watched donors, board members, parents, and administrators say one thing while arranging another. Those skills do not come from a badge or a forensics course. They come from years of paying attention while other people assume you are merely present.
That last part matters. Women in midlife are often underestimated, which gives Vivian room to work. People talk around her. They offer explanations she did not request. They mistake her quietness for agreement and her age for harmlessness. Vivian is not invisible, exactly. She is simply no longer the person many men in a room expect to be dangerous to them.
I did not want her divorce to be a temporary sadness that disappears as soon as the plot begins. Nor did I want it to define her as broken. Vivian loved her husband. She built a life with him. The marriage still ended, and she is still learning how much of herself she placed inside it. Her investigation and her stalled writing are connected because both ask her to trust her own judgment again.
She does not need to become a different woman to solve the mystery. She needs permission to use the woman she already is.
That is one reason her friendships matter so much. The women of the Fog & Quill Society are not decorative side characters waiting to applaud the sleuth. They have their own work, neighborhoods, histories, and opinions. They tell Vivian the truth about her pages and, when required, about herself. Midlife friendship can be wonderfully unsentimental. These women know one another too well to offer empty encouragement, but they also know when to arrive with food.
Writing Vivian at fifty-two gave me a sleuth who could be both newly vulnerable and deeply experienced. She is beginning again, but she is not beginning from nothing. She brings every classroom, dinner table, committee meeting, argument, and quiet morning with her. Her past is not baggage the story must remove before she can move forward. It is the equipment she uses.
I hope readers who have ever looked at a life they carefully assembled and thought, now what? will recognize something in her. Reinvention does not belong only to the young. Sometimes it begins with a cat on the windowsill, an unfinished page, and the decision to walk down the steps instead of staying home.
The Filbert Steps is the first book in the Telegraph Hill Mysteries by Lila Blake. It releases August 31, 2026, from Sutro House Press. Learn more at lilablake.com.
About Filbert Steps
The Filbert Steps (The Telegraph Hill Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – California
Publisher : Sutro House Press
Publication date : August 31, 2026
Print length : 301 pages
Digital
ISBN-13 : 979-8951746016
ASIN : B0H52YDTRG
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.
Perfect for readers who love older women sleuths, atmospheric San Francisco mysteries, neighborhood secrets, found community, and fair-play cozy mysteries with literary depth.
Storybook Lady
Review
Filbert Steps
by Lila Blake
Lila Blake’s debut novel lets you know with the first sentence that someone will die in a manner of days. But it reads more like literary fiction than a cozy mystery. The story begins slowly winding itself through the days of a fifty-two year old divorcee who spends her days struggling with a stalled biography of Dashiell Hammett. Instead of writing, she descends the Filbert Steps to spend time at the neighborhood deli or bakery and visit with her neighbors. The atmospheric story describes one block of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill where time has seemed to stand still and could easily be part of one of Hammett’s Sam Spade novels. She lays out the plot, a real estate developer has been slowly buying out the buildings on the block and when leases are up, the rent will raise to Market value, forcing out businesses that have lasted for generations. When the man is found on a landing of the winding wooden steps, Vivian Salvatore does not believe it was an accidental fall. Too many details say otherwise. As a retired teacher, she has years of practice noticing details and reading people. This fair play mystery provides the details for the experienced arm chair detective to pick up, allowing the reader to solve the mystery along with the sleuth. The plot is simple, but the descriptive setting and complicated characters will captivate the reader. I loved this page turner and can’t wait for Lila Blake’s next Telegraph Hill Mystery.
Interested in more of my reviews? Just check out Julie Ditton on Goodreads where you will find almost two thousand reviews in a variety of genres. For more books like this one, I have a Goodreads shelf specifically for Cozy Mysteries.
About Lila Blake
Lila Blake writes San Francisco neighborhood mysteries about foggy stairways, old houses, found family, and the secrets people keep when a place begins to change. Her Telegraph Hill Mysteries begin with The Filbert Steps, a literary cozy mystery featuring Vivian Salvatore, a fifty-two-year-old former teacher rebuilding her life after divorce. Lila is published by Sutro House Press, an independent fiction imprint based in San Francisco.
Links:
Website: lilablake.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71129242.Lila_Blake
Purchase Link: Amazon
TOUR PARTICIPANTS
August 24 – Guatemala Paula Loves to Read – SPOTLIGHT
August 24 – Socrates Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 24 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT
August 25 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – RECIPE
August 25 – @bibliophile_foodie – REVIEW
August 25 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 26 – Storybook Lady – REVIEW, AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 26 – Sarandipity’s – AUTHOR INTERVIEW
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August 27 – Romance Novel Giveaways – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 28 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
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August 28 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT
August 29 – Ruff Drafts – CHARACTER GUEST POST
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August 30 – Cozy Up With Kathy – REVIEW, AUTHOR INTERVIEW
August 30 – Book Hookup – REVIEW
August 31 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading Books – REVIEW
August 31 – Sarcastically Yours, Jen – SPOTLIGHT
Filbert Steps
Giveaway
The author is offering a tour wide GIVEAWAY -One $25 Amazon gift card for an international or U.S. winner. If the winner is in the U.S., they will also receive one paperback copy of The Filbert Steps when available.
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The Sam Spade comparison got me, since Vivian can’t get her own Hammett biography off the ground. Thank you for both the review and the guest post space, Julie. A generous stop.