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Summary
Summary
The national bestselling author presents a high society murder mystery...
At Snapdragon, a high-end designer consignment shop, Helen is at the beck and call of snobby- yet frugal-customers. That alone is a deadly combination, especially with Chrissy, a drool-worthy fashionista who walks in with a purse to sell, and ends up screaming at her husband and another customer.
Helen is used to dealing with snobby women, controlling husbands, and fashionable politicians. But she's about to have to handle a brand new type of unsatisfied customer-a murderer. Chrissy is found dead in Snapdragon's dressing room, with the hand-painted scarf Helen was just holding tied around her neck. And Helen goes from being low on society's totem pole to high on the police's suspect list.
Author Notes
Before becoming a full-time author, Elaine Viets worked in the field of journalism. She is the author of the Dead-End Job Mystery series; the Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper series; and the Francesca Vierling Mystery series. Her short story Wedding Knife, which appeared in Chesapeake Crimes, won both the Agatha and the Anthony Awards. Viets resides in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A posh Fort Lauderdale, Fla., resale shop provides the snazzy scene of the crime in Viets's superior ninth mystery starring Helen Hawthorne, the queen of dead-end jobs and magnet for murder (after 2009's Killer Cuts). Helen and Vera Salinda, the owner of Snapdragon's Second Thoughts, are shocked when Chrissy Martlet, a wealthy developer's sexy trophy wife, is found fatally bonked on the head with a Limoges pineapple, then hung with a Gucci scarf after trying to sell Vera some of her designer goods. Identifying Chrissy's killer as well as the culprit who bashes in the head of a model friend with a beer bottle tests Helen's sleuthing abilities to the limit. A teasing plot twist serves up a reminder that even if her greedy ex-husband, Rob, might finally stop pestering her and better jobs appear, there are still mountains to climb before Helen can rest easy with Phil, her PI honey. Viets doesn't waste a word in this tight, fast-paced installment as she deftly balances comedy and tragedy. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Still another murder can't be good news for a consignment-shop clerk who's trying to keep a low profile since fleeing an unjust divorce settlement.Florida seemed like just the place for CPA Helen Hawthorn to bury herself in a series of dead-end jobs with salaries that might fly under the IRS's formidable radar. So when a Missouri judge awarded her ex-husband Rob half her future earnings, Helen (Murder with Reservations, 2007, etc.) chucked her well-paying job and headed south. Now she works for Vera Salinda at Snapdragon's Second Thoughts, where Palm Beach's elite bring their size-two castoffs to be sold at a hefty markdown. Chrissy Martlet is haggling with Vera over a pony-hair Prada purse when her developer husband Danny shows up. Pretty soon Chrissy is hanging by a designer scarf in a dressing room. Helen wants to look into Chrissy's murder, if only to save Vera from harassment by police detective Richard McNally, but gets sidetracked by her mother's death from complications of a stroke. A trip back to St. Louis to bury her mom strikes her fianc Phil as the perfect opportunity for Helen to put herself right with the law. In spite of her stepfather Larry's penny-pinching, Helen and her sister Kathy give their mother a fitting sendoff, though it's interrupted by an unexpected visit. Then Helen and Phil head back to Florida, where the unsolved murder case is the only obstacle to their nuptials.Helen's ninth is oddly shaped, with a unnecessary twist that defies logic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
For mystery readers, every book is a beach book and every day is a beach day. But even genre novels present a variety of escapist choices. I don't know about you, but mysteries that make me laugh go right into the book bag. And Deborah Coonts makes the cut with WANNA GET LUCKY? (Forge/ Tom Doherty, $24.99), set at the Babylon Hotel, "the newest, most over-the-top megacasino/resort on the Las Vegas Strip." The story opens with the gaudy death of a woman who falls out of one of the hotel's private helicopters, landing in the lagoon in front of the Treasure Island Hotel and "disrupting the 8:30 p.m. pirate show." But not even death-by-helicopter-drop can compete with the porn industry's Sex-a-Rama fair or the swinging Trendmakers party, with music provided by the Naked Mariachis. Lucky O'Toole, the statuesque beauty in charge of customer relations for the Babylon, narrates the novel in a voice that aims for brittle sophistication but melts into girlish gush whenever she's in the company of the sexy men in competition for her heart (and other body parts). No matter. Lucky has some nice things going for her, including a mother who operates Mona's Place, held in high regard as "the best whorehouse in Nevada." Blessed with the insight to find humor in the human condition, Lucky can also deal with 400-pound men of the cloth who pass out without benefit of cloth in a public stairway. Let's just hope the job doesn't wear her out. Tarquin Hall writes amusing mysteries set in Delhi and featuring Vish Puri, the conscientious proprietor of Most Private Investigators Ltd., a firm specializing in "matrimonial investigations." Meeting Puri again in THE CASE OF THE MAN WHO DIED LAUGHING (Simon & Schuster, $24), it's reassuring to note that he isn't at all fazed when the Hindu goddess Kali materializes at a Laughing Club held in a public park, smiting down Dr. Suresh Jha, a noted atheist and "Guru Buster." Hall's affectionate humor is embedded with barbs. Puri is sympathetic to Dr. Jha's view that as long as "corruption ate at the heart of the political system" India would never cast off its feudal yoke. So even as this amiably fatalistic detective tries to explain the rules of bribery to a client ("Sir, in India the line between what is legal and what is not is often somewhat of a fuzz"), he feels honorbound to solve Dr. Jha's murder. The humor is decidedly morbid in Sophie Littlefield's down-home mysteries about a female vigilante who extends a helping (if occasionally bloody) hand to battered women in rural Missouri. Stella Hardesty, who owns a sewing machine repair and supply shop that she inherited from her late husband, doesn't look dangerous, although everyone in town knows about the wrench she was clutching when the sheriff discovered her husband's body. In A BAD DAY FOR PRETTY (Thomas Dunne /Minotaur, $24.99), Stella is itching to get on with her re-education of the "no-good, wife-smacking, covenant-breaking" men of Sawyer County. But first she has to keep one of her successfully reclaimed subjects from being locked up for the murder of an unknown woman whose mummified body surfaces when a tornado rips through the fairgrounds. And just when another tornado is heading for town. Jack Reacher, the protagonist of Lee Child's pumped-up thrillers, was born without a funnybone, but he's indisputably the best escape artist in this escapist genre. In 61 HOURS (Delacorte, $28), Child drops a few more hints about the shadowy past of his hero, an ex-military cop who lives on the road, carrying no bags, traveling by instinct and stopping by chance. Reacher is hitching a ride on a church-group tour bus when a blizzard blows him into a small prison town in South Dakota. Forced to sit tight for a few days, he finds himself minding an interesting older woman marked for elimination because she witnessed a crime. The encounter gives Reacher a chance to talk more than he usually does, but it doesn't slow him down a bit. In her lighthearted way, Elaine Viets applies Child's inspired formula to her "dead-end job" mystery series featuring Helen Hawthorne, who left home when a heartless judge in St. Louis awarded her no-good husband half her future earnings. Helen took to the road, living cheap, moving often and working in places like Snapdragon's Second Thoughts, the Fort Lauderdale consignment shop where we find her in HALF-PRICE HOMICIDE (Obsidian, $22.95). Nine books into the series, Viets is still working clever variations on the theme of an emancipated woman making the most of her limited options. To fulfill the genre conventions, a real-estate developer's trophy wife is murdered in a dressing room. The real draw, though, is Viets's snappy critique of South Florida, especially her acid-etched sketches of the shop's clientele. If all good mysteries make ideal summer reading, what does a mystery fan turn to for true escape? How about a supernatural mystery that intensifies the suspense by thickening the atmosphere. SO COLD THE RIVER (Little, Brown, $24.99), by Michael Koryta, is a superior specimen, with its eerie tale of a lovely valley in Indiana where at one time an elixir known as Pluto Water bubbled up from the underground springs. The restoration of the valley's two old spa hotels attracts the interest of a cinematographer from Chicago who drinks the water and starts having visions. The scary parts aren't all that scary, but Koryta sets a beautiful scene, resplendent with dreamy images of phantom railroad trains and ghosts who wear bowler hats and play the violin. If all good mysteries make ideal summer reading, what does a mystery fan turn to for true escape?