1958 San Francisco: Beatniks, Eisenhower, Fillmore District jazz and Major League baseball. As Mayor George Christopher fights an influx of organized crime and redevelopment begins to transform the city, racial and political tensions rise when a Black real estate magnate is murdered.

Kay Schiffner is a practicing lawyer by day, during a time when women were rarely hired as lawyers. At night, she secretly follows her passion for playing jazz at the Blue Moon in San Francisco's Fillmore District, a neighborhood where good white women weren't supposed to go.

Leitisha Boone is the Fillmore District's only Black female club owner, having started her career in her father's barbecue joint. She's not about to give up her successful and elegant Blue Moon when threatened by redevelopment and betrayed by men who don't believe women should run a business, even when threats turn deadly.

When Leitisha is arrested for murder, Kay's search for the truth leads her from city politics to the mafia, Beatnik poets to union graft. As pressure mounts from her boss, the police force, and organized crime, Kay must make an impossible choice: to save her hard-won job as a lawyer or to risk her own life and livelihood to try and save the friend and her club that gave her music.

But Not for Me is more than a crime story with a murder to solve. Told through the experiences of two women, the novel explores the dark side of gentrification in one of America's most colorful cities.