Barbara Seranella, a former Brentwood auto mechanic who became a best-selling author of a series of mystery novels featuring a woman auto-mechanic protagonist with an unsavory past, has died. She was 50.
Seranella, a resident of Laguna Beach and La Quinta, died of liver disease Sunday while awaiting a liver transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said her husband, Ron.
"We went there Dec. 6 with the hope of getting a liver," he said Tuesday, "but the window of opportunity never appeared."
Seranella introduced Miranda "Munch" Mancini -- a young ex-con prostitute who attempts to rid her life of drugs, booze and her biker buddies after becoming involved in a murder investigation and assuming a new identity as a car mechanic -- in "No Human Involved," which reached No. 5 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in 1997.
"It's a first of its kind, a hyper-modern mystery totally different than anything written before by a woman," Sheldon McArthur of the Mysterious Bookshop in West Hollywood told The Times in 1997.
Unlike other crime-solving mystery heroines such as Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski or Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, who "are on the right side of the law," McArthur said, Seranella's Munch Mancini "is an anti-heroine, on the law's wrong side. She's closer to a male villain than a good guy. Yet you wind up rooting for her, although you would not invite her home for dinner."
Seven more Seranella mysteries featuring Munch (short for Munchkin) Mancini and chronicling her personal progress followed, most recently "An Unacceptable Death," published in 2006.
"What I think makes her stories unique," said Patricia McFall, an author and writing instructor who knew Seranella, "is that she has a character with a past that won't go away. So anytime a so-called pal shows up, it's because they got out of prison or got into trouble. And she's always fighting to stay on the high moral ground that she has brought into her life and keep from falling back into a kind of drug-filled, crime-filled life."
In creating that gritty life, Seranella didn't have to dig too deep.
Barbara Shore was born April 30, 1956, in Santa Monica and raised in Pacific Palisades. Her parents assumed she'd go to college, as did her two older brothers.
Instead, while she was in the ninth grade at Paul Revere Junior High School, she ran away from home at 14.
