Meet Cindy Thomas, pretty, blonde and city cool. She's a crime desk reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Cindy is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she was a sociology major. She loves yoga, jazz music and, like her friend Lindsay Boxer, loves to read travel books and mysteries—she's even a member of a book club. She also has a tattoo, but unlike Lindsay, she has two small G-clefs on her shoulder.

Meet Claire Washburn, Claire is black and heavyset; she always jokes, "I'm in shape... round's a shape." Claire is wise, confident, kind, and the Chief Medical Examiner for San Francisco. She is married to Edmund, a kettle drum-player in the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Claire and Edmund have two teenage sons and a young daughter named Ruby Rose. Her tattoo: an outline of a butterfly just below her waist. She also goes by the nickname "Butterfly" and has it embroidered on her lab coat at work.

Yuki Castellano is an ambitious, young San Francisco district attorney who is passionate, brilliant, given to speaking at 90 miles per hour, and sometimes wears a magenta red streak in her glossy, black, shoulder-length hair. Her parents met at a graduate school mixer for foreign students and married within three weeks. Her mother is Japanese and her father Italian American. Yuki's favorite drink, when out with the other members of the Club, is a Germain-Robin sidecar.