Leigh’s fledgling ad company isn’t bringing in much money yet, so her father’s suggestion that she help out Mike Tanner sounds perfect. The hours work out well, since Mike likes to work late at night which allows Leigh to work at her own business during the day. Leigh is particularly happy to work with Mike since he is recently divorced and she finds him as attractive now as she did back in high school.

One night Mike and Leigh finish surgery about two in the morning and she heads out to the parking lot by herself. On the way, she stops to investigate a light behind the Staff Only door at the cat habitat. When Leigh enters, she sees trails of blood everywhere, hears something that spooks her, picks up a knife, and runs out the door. Outside, she observes a tiger gnawing on what look like a human leg and she races to find a guard. After touching things at the crime scene and nervously running her hands through her hair and on her shirt, she is now covered with blood, causing the guard to assume she is involved with the crime. The police, after interviewing her, seem equally convinced.

Mike is interested in Leigh, but hasn’t been completely honest with her. The murder victim, Carmen, was one of his many girlfriends, and just happens to be Leigh’s nemesis from high school. The investigator on the case decides the crime is motivated by a love triangle between Carmen, Mike and Leigh and the evidence mounts against her.

Leigh’s best friend Maura, a police officer in another county, discovers that Leigh is the number one suspect. Warren, her old college friend, retains an excellent, hotshot lawyer for her. Leigh has always been able to rely on her friends to bail her out of her frequent troubles and predicaments, both literally and figuratively, while avoiding her own responsibilities.

Leigh is a rather difficult main character. She obstinately continues to be attracted to the man the police consider her accomplice and sulks after her lawyer and friends give her the excellent advice to stay away from him. She acts in a dim-witted fashion leaving the zoo at two in the morning without an escort and walking alone into a room where something is obviously amiss. She additionally fails an amateur detective’s qualifications by touching everything at the crime scene after she notices rivulets of blood all over the walls. When someone describes Leigh as a person with guts, she disagrees and says she has “… a good self-defense mechanism for blocking out reality.”

The book’s most unusual feature is that the amateur detective is not the heroine; she is the catalyst. Leigh describes herself as having the gift of being able to walk into trouble, but at times, it seems less a gift and more of a lack of intelligence. In fact, the true sleuths in this story are Maura, Detective Frank, and Katherine, her attorney, who are all much more likable than Leigh and actually solve the crime.

In its favor, the book reads quickly, the murder is original, and the setting is unusual, yet I wish Leigh had been brighter or the author had chosen to star one of her secondary characters.

--Monica Pope