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'We had a psychiatrist living next door,' she remembers. Zellerbach relates how her first book, Love in a Dark House, came about. They had one son, Gary, and a friendly divorce after 18 years. The daughter of a conservative rabbi, Zellerbach (née Burstein) considers herself 'an agnostic who believes in God.' At the end of her sophomore year at Stanford, where she studied psychology, she married Stephen Zellerbach, whose family business was the Zellerbach Paper Company (later Crown-Zellerbach). During the late '60s, Zellerbach was a panelist (with actress June Lockhart) on ABC-TV's game show Oh, My Word! She wrote the San Francisco Chronicle column 'My Fair City' from 1962 to 1985. Dianne Feinstein, '55, among her close friends. An active contributor of time and money to charitable causes, she's passionate about health and euthanasia issues.

At the center of San Francisco's social swirl for 12 years as editor of the Nob Hill Gazette, a lifestyle and philanthropy magazine, she's well acquainted with life at the top.

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Zellerbach has a full past with a wealth of material to draw on. A fourth book, Dying to Dance, will be out later this year.

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Mystery of the Mermaid, The Missing Mother and Love to Die For appeared to warm trade reviews, with Publishers Weekly comparing the series to the early works of Mary Higgins Clark. She sets her plots in the Bay Area and keeps the reader absorbed with recognizable character types and local color. Zellerbach, '52, writes with wry wit and a breezy style. Surrounded by medical expertise and malfeasance, she evolves novel by novel, as the mystery within begins to reflect the mystery without. Zellerbach's Marsh-the heroine of three novels so far-becomes an accidental detective after breast cancer changes the course of her life. 'I was born here, educated here and still see too many of my old school chums from Stanford.' I can never lie about my age,' she says with a laugh. 'I'm just getting started I feel fit and fabulous.

The Hallie Marsh Mystery Series, however, reflects the Bay Area author's present concern: the injustices of death. Her earlier novels paint psychological portraits. At 82, Merla Zellerbach has been reborn as a mystery writer.

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