The Filbert Steps book tour is through Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours and includes a giveaway. Share, comment, follow, enter to win.
Book Details
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.
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
Author Interview
What is your favorite part of this book, and why?
It’s Coppa’s, the little espresso bar where Vivian’s neighbors gather every morning. I loved writing it because it’s the whole book in miniature: Sal pulling doppios beneath his father’s
photograph, Eddie in the back booth pretending not to listen, Maria turning her cup a quarter-
turn before she says the thing nobody else will. A cozy mystery lives or dies on the pleasure of
the ordinary hours, and Coppa’s is where the regulars keep half an eye on each other over their
coffee. The clue you need and the community you’re rooting for tend to be sitting at the same
table, and getting to write both at once was the most fun I had. I go to a café like it in my own
neighborhood, a whole cast of retired regulars who turn up every day, and their little
idiosyncrasies found their way into a lot of these characters.
If you could spend time with a character from your book, whom would it be, and what
would you do that day?
Vivian, of course, though spending a day with her mostly means being quietly taught to pay
attention. We’d climb the Filbert Steps at dawn, when the wild parrots are arguing in the
eucalyptus and the fog hasn’t decided whether to stay. We’d get a doppio at Coppa’s and sit in
the window while she told me, without seeming to, which regular hadn’t slept and which one
was lying about something small. Then a long, unhurried walk through North Beach, past the
deli and Washington Square, with Burgess supervising from a safe distance. By lunch I’d have
noticed three things about my own street that I’d walked past for years.
What books or authors have most inspired you?
Agatha Christie taught me to play fair with the reader, that the clue should be right there on the
page, hidden in plain sight. Louise Penny showed me that a neighborhood can be a character
you fall in love with and then grieve for. Dashiell Hammett gave me San Francisco itself, which is
exactly why Vivian is forever failing to finish a biography of him. And for warmth and a good
ensemble, Richard Osman, and closer to home, Armistead Maupin, who understood that a city is
really just a set of overlapping small towns keeping one another’s secrets.
Are your characters based on real people, or did they come entirely from your imagination?
The places are almost all real: the Filbert Steps, Coit Tower, Washington Square, the long climb
home. The people are invented, but they’re stitched together from types anyone who’s loved an
old neighborhood will recognize: the café owner who won’t fix the two broken chairs out of
equal parts spite and sentiment, the deli man who slices your mortadella on Saturday and not a
minute before, the woman who remembers exactly who fed whom the night someone died.
Coppa’s isn’t one real café; it’s a dozen real windows I’ve sat in. I’ve tucked small details of my
neighbors and my own corner of the city into it. I live on the other side of San Francisco from
North Beach, but a lot of the mannerisms and habits of my daily world are written into the
characters. I notice what time people arrive, what time they leave, and why they’re leaving.
What made you want to become a writer?
I’ve always been an observer, and I grew up loving mysteries and daydreaming. This book is
really my daydreams written down. The inspiration for it was that café in my neighborhood I
mentioned. I love meeting new people and learning about them. I wanted to put a particular San
Francisco on the page: the foggy stairways, the old cafés, the people who’ve lived in a
neighborhood longest, before all of it gets priced out and painted over. A staircase, a café, a wall
of photographs gone brown at the edges: each one holds a whole community’s worth of secrets.
I wanted to write the kind of book that treats that as something worth solving, and worth loving.
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 – NO POST YET
August 25 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 26 – Storybook Lady – REVIEW, AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 26 – Sarandipity’s – AUTHOR INTERVIEW -NO POST YET
August 27 – Jody’s Bookish Haven – SPOTLIGHT
August 27 – Romance Novel Giveaways – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 28 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
August 28 – Elizabeth McKenna – Author – SPOTLIGHT
August 28 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT
August 29 – Ruff Drafts – CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 29 – StoreyBook Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 29 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT
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
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.
