Francie (Francine) LeVillard is the great-granddaughter of Francois Le Villard, the renowned detective who was with the Deuxieme Bureau in Paris and who worked closely with Sherlock Holmes a century earlier. (The space in the last name was dropped by her grandparents when the arrived on this side of The Big Pond.) Francie got her chops as a professional investigator while working in television news on the East Coast. Distressed by the decline in journalism, she sought a change of venue and moved to a station in Sacramento. She discovered she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Her news director...Well, you can read about that delicious fiasco in Francie's First Case, which was published in Volume Two. Anyway, she moved down to the Monterey Peninsula and more specifically found a wonderful home at Yankee Point. She also made a change in her professional life, employing her news-learned talents and tapping into her great-grandfather's genes. She became a consulting detective, ala the Dean of Baker Street himself.