Before Hannah has time to fret, Kiki and Casey have gone off somewhere, and it's only later that night, when Hannah opens the door to find a frantic Kiki, that she has any inkling something is very wrong. Seems that Kiki and Casey retired to his room to, er, turn up the heat -- only it was too much for Casey. When Kiki came out of the bathroom, she found him dead on the bed, dressed in nothing but a pirate's cape. A heart attack --but not a natural one.

Kiki is now the prime suspect, and Hannah needs to prove her innocence. It isn't long before Casey's enemies begin to surface -- and there are a raft of them, from his business partner to his personal assistant own son. All had motive and access. Any one of them could have slipped the lethal heart drug into Casey's drink at the gala.

Most of the same zany characters from the first book in the series are back to lend flavor to this one. There's Naomi, who channels for an Indian warrior named Red Moon when she isn't holding séances for dead poodles. There's over-the-top Wanda, determined to take her place at the pinnacle of Hill Creek society, whatever that may be. There's Lauren, the niece, who can't quite make up her mind who she's infatuated with at the moment. The locals wander in and out, gumming up the investigation and causing mild havoc of their own. And the one-liners keep coming, both in the dialogue and in the narrative. I grinned through a lot of this book.

And in the end, the mystery was pretty darn concealed. Annie Griffin knows how to throw in a red herring. The one character I missed was the ex-police chief with the bum knee, John Perez. He's off climbing a mountain somewhere but promises to show up in the next installment.

Hannah and Kiki have a good thing going. If you like snappy stories with a few outrageous characters, make a Date With the Perfect Dead Man. You'll be grinning, too.

--Cathy Sova