Marti is more than a little fed up with being at Jana’s beck and call, but plans the party anyway. While Marti oversees the festivities, Jana decides to escape the crowd by hiding out in the laundry room. When Marti goes to look for her, she finds Jana’s lifeless body lying on the floor. Who would want to kill Jana? And why?

To make matters worse, the detective assigned to the case has a major grudge against Marti because of her previous involvement in amateur sleuthing. Detective Rostelli gets his revenge by making Marti his prime suspect, and it’s not that much of a stretch. Marti had her own reasons for hating her best friend, and next to Jana herself, knows every aspect of her dead friend’s personal life. Can Marti find the killer and clear her name before the killer comes after her, too?

My main difficulty with this novel was that I just could not like Marti no matter how hard I tried. She’s less than faithful to her husband, mean to children, takes drugs (recreationally, of course), doesn’t have a real job to speak of, is half in love with her cousin, and is a major bitch. She’s also a former protestor of the Vietnam War, so she doesn’t trust police and is uncooperative in the investigation. She flees crime scenes more than once.

Detective Rostelli is supposedly framing Marti, but aside from a mention of a “close associate” being involved in Jana’s death in the New York Post, there is no set up. In fact Rostelli is a minor secondary character, leaving another detective to have most of the contact with Marti.

Normally, I tend to let editorial errors roll off my back but this book had some glaring boo-boos. Chapter eight finds Marti talking to a lawyer about the murder. She launches into story, babbling all the way. More than once I noticed quotation marks missing, making me wonder if Marti was thinking to herself, or talking to the lawyer. Page 114 features the line, “What am I doing to do?” page 170: “I knew had the kids in my pocket” and page 189: “If you want something that’s going put you…..”

This is book 3 in a series, and Moore did a very nice job filling in background information. Jana and Marti’s relationship, Marti’s past amateur sleuthing, her marriage and family history were all there. I never felt as if I was missing part of the story, because past and present are carefully constructed and meshed together.

The mystery is also entertaining and fun to read about. There’s old money, new money, models, actors, junkies and drug dealers, all of which give the story an array of colorful characters to work with.

On the strength of the story this book is worth 3 stars, but Marti’s personality and editorial errors more than dampened my enjoyment.

--Wendy Crutcher