Girl With a Past

UC Berkeley in the 1960's could be a murderous place for a Cal co-ed. Lexi Johnson thought tear gas was all she had to fear on the day she was murdered.

In 2008, University of California student Alexandra Nichols' interest in Lexi's murder stirs up trouble that forces her to solve the forty-year-old homicide in order to protect her family. Transcendental twists in her dangerous hunt for the serial killer reveals secrets and that she is the Girl With A Past.

Multiple shootings and her mother's kidnapping have Alexandra racing to find the persons threatening her and her family. When Alexandra is shot at on campus, she realizes she may know more about the earlier shootings than anyone would suspect. Some clues are found in the hippie era, especially the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco.

Armed with her new understanding of the case, Alexandra and her brother, Steven, search from Marin to Tahoe for who wants to kill her––and why?

Their questions, and hints that they know more that they should, make their parents' old college friends, now pillars of the community, nervous that their secrets will be revealed. Not only might their successful lives be ruined––they could be ended.

The author, Sherri Leigh James, graduated from UC Berkeley in 1969. The late 60's in the San Francisco Bay Area were wild and adventurous times filled with politics, protests, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Her adventures, and those of her friends, while attending UC Berkeley provide material for lots of stories. Fascinated by mysteries both fictional and factual, she followed developments of the Zodiac case and other Bay Area crime stories that play a part in her writing.