The fifth book in the Yarn Woman, “The Woman Who Loved Sunflowers,” takes Ruth M, the Yarn Woman, from San Francisco to California’s Central Valley in search of Mrs. Jill Lynch, who disappeared on her weekly trip from Oakland to San Francisco to volunteer at humanitarian nonprofit. At first glance it seems like Mrs. Lynch has been living a quiet suburban life with her husband, leaving home every Wednesday to help pack knitted woolens to ship to war-torn areas of the Middle East. But when Ruth is called in by SFPD Detective William Chu, the first thing she observes is the woman’s seventeenth-century textiles and artwork, rare pieces masquerading as twenty-first-century kitsch. A book of matches near unlit candles in Mrs. Lynch’s fiber-arts room sends Ruth to the San Francisco waterfront where Mrs. Lynch is apparently living a second life with an artist and lover. As Ruth unravels the mystery of the missing woman, she finds herself confronting a tangle of identities wrapped in Faustian pacts, industrial espionage, and a cold-case murder that spawned the melange of deceptions that are now rising up to claim Mrs. Lynch’s life, and perhaps her soul.