APPLE | BARNES & NOBLE | GOOGLE PLAY | KOBO
AMAZON US | AMAZON CA | AMAZON AU | AMAZON UK
Some clients you just can’t say no to. Even when you really, really want to.
Forty-year-old PI Gina Kelly is still picking up the pieces after her husband David’s death—and the revelation that he was leaving her for his twenty-five-year-old mistress. So when Jacquie Demetros walks into her office asking for help, Gina’s first instinct is to show her the door.
But Jacquie isn’t there to gloat. She’s there because she thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her.
The irony is too delicious to resist. Besides, Gina needs the money.
What should be a straightforward surveillance job—follow the guy, catch him in the act, collect the fee—goes sideways when Nick Costanza turns up dead. Suddenly Gina finds herself investigating not infidelity, but murder. And her client is suspect number one.
As Gina digs deeper into Nick’s world, she uncovers a tangled web of mob connections, gambling debts, and old grudges. There’s Nick’s boss Sal, who’s been like a father to him. There’s the mysterious new coworker Megan. And then there’s Jacquie herself, whose tears may or may not be genuine.
Navigating this mess with her Gen-Z assistant Zachary, her business partner Rachel (who’s dating Gina’s trainwreck of a brother-in-law), and Detective Jaime Mendoza (who keeps showing up at inconvenient moments), Gina races to find the killer before she becomes the next victim. Because when you’ve made an enemy of a murderer, karma comes back to bite. Literally, if the attack dogs have anything to say about it.
Excerpt
It was a Wednesday morning in mid-November, and despite my best intentions, I was failing hard at minding my own business.
“Daniel took you to dinner at Fidelio’s?”
I meant to keep my tone carefully neutral, but even I could hear the shrillness leak through. Zachary, who was over on the sofa playing with Edwina the Boston Terrier, winced. It didn’t help when I added, “Does he know that that’s where David had his last meal, or was it just the luck of the draw?”
Rachel’s cheeks turned pink, from anger as much as embarrassment, I’m sure. David was my late husband—which he became just in time to avoid becoming my ex—and Rachel had been his administrative assistant for a few years at that point. Now she was my business partner, partly as penance for not telling me about David’s mistress (the nubile Jackie-with-a-q) sooner, and partly because she had needed a job after the murder and subsequent mess of a scandal.
Most of the time she feels bad enough about it that we get along without much friction. However, it seemed that criticizing Daniel Kelly, my erstwhile brother-in-law and Rachel’s new beau, was too far over the line.
“I don’t know, Gina,” she told me, dangerously. “It didn’t seem like something I ought to bring up over Spaghetti Bolognese.”
“You might have brought it up beforehand, though. Like, when he invited you there.”
“He didn’t invite me there,” Rachel said. “He picked me up, and that’s where he drove me.”
“When you pulled up outside, then.”
“And say what?” Rachel wanted to know. “It’s not like the food killed David. It was the brake cables that did that.”
“I’m well aware of it,” I said stiffly, “thank you. It just seems a bit… callous. Doesn’t it?”
I glanced at Zachary for support. He shrugged.
Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Are you telling me you haven’t been back to Fidelio’s since David died? Or that you’d refuse to go if someone—the writer, say—invited you?”
“Greg is on tour,” I said automatically. And added, “No, of course not. But it’s a little different for Daniel. David was his brother.”
“And he was your husband.”
I scoffed. “Barely. And by the time he died I was wishing him dead myself. Not that I would have done anything about it, of course.”
“Of course not, “Rachel agreed. “He was a bastard, no question. I won’t say he deserved what he got—”
No, I wouldn’t say that, either, at least not where anyone could hear me.
“—but he wasn’t who I thought he was when I went to work for him.”
No, me either. Although in my defense, I had been twenty-two when I met and married David, and as such pretty easily impressed. Now I was forty and jaded.
“I’m just concerned,” I said. “I spent eighteen years watching my husband slip his brother money and bail him out of one half-baked scheme after another. I don’t like you getting involved in that.”
And not only because she was my business partner and whatever was going on with her would inevitably spill over into what was going on with me. But I knew, from having done it, that the emotional toll of catering to another self-centered bastard would be high.
Then again, so did Rachel. She had survived a less-than-stellar marriage of her own, before having to deal with her boss’s murder and his partner’s embezzlement. And she must have known Daniel’s deeds and misdeeds almost as well as, or perhaps better than, me. David probably slipped his brother money from the business accounts, too.
So I said, not for the first time (and probably not the last), “If he makes you happy, then I’m happy for you.”
Rachel snorted, as if she knew full well that I was trying to convince myself as much as her.
From his spot on the floor, Zachary made the toy Lambchop in his hand squeak before tossing it across the reception area. “Go get it, Edwina!”
The Boston Terrier’s eyes lit up and she scampered after it, tiny paws scrambling on the old hardwoods.
“And Kenny’s excited about the bar,” Rachel continued blithely. “He’s really invested in making it work.”
I looked up at that. Kenny Kelly was Daniel’s nephew, but more than that, he was David’s son and my stepson. I was intimately familiar with Kenny’s failings, even more so than I was with Daniel’s.
“Invested how?” I asked suspiciously.
Kenny had been eight when I married his father, his sister Krystal three years older, and they had both resented me from the moment we met. I was replacing their mother in David’s affections, and I was also taking their father away from them.
I, meanwhile, hadn’t had any idea how to be a mother at twenty-two, especially not to two children who were closer in age to me than I was to their father. They hated me, and made no secret of it. And in the end, they had both believed that I killed David, which hadn’t endeared me to them, or them to me, further.
“He put in his inheritance,” Rachel said brightly. “From David.”
When I stared at her, a defensive edge crept into her voice. “It’s a really good opportunity, Gina. The location is perfect, right in the heart of Five Points, and—”
“Five Points?” I set down my pen. “The Five Points that’s right across the river from downtown Nashville? The one that has one of the highest rents in Nashville, and where half the bars fail in the first year? That Five Points?”
Rachel sniffed. “There’s only one Five Points in Nashville, Gina.”
After a moment she added, “And Daniel knows what he’s doing.”
That was debatable. Sure, he was familiar with bars. Intimately familiar. But that was from drinking in them, not running them.
Before I could say that, though, or figure out a way to express my concerns without sounding like a judgmental shrew, the front door opened.
I expected it to be UPS. Maybe FedEx, or a package of office supplies from Amazon. But certainly not a client. We’d had exactly two of those since I’d gotten my PI license, and both had been people I knew personally. The stalking I’d done for Diana Morton, my divorce attorney, had been pro bono—it seemed the least I could do after she had done all that work to represent me and then David just dropped dead before the divorce was final—and his acquaintances had mostly chosen him over me in the separation. After his death, only Heidi Newsome had come crawling back, and she, it turned out, had had ulterior motives.
And yes, even if I wasn’t about to admit it (to myself or anyone else), the thought crossed my mind that it might be Jaime Mendoza. The detective had been conspicuously absent since the end of the Newsome case, and I was starting to worry. He usually pops up every few weeks or so, and it had been longer than that now.
But it wasn’t Mendoza, nor was it UPS, FedEx, or the Amazon driver. It wasn’t even Diana. No, what I got instead was the last person I had expected to see: Jacquie Demetros.
My late almost-ex-husband’s mistress emerged through the door like she was stepping onto a stage, all tumbling dark hair and curves and a luxurious fur coat over a pair of designer jeans. At twenty-five, she looks like Salma Hayek’s younger sister—the one who’s gotten all the good genes but has had none of the wear and tear.
Edwina’s toy dropped from Zachary’s nerveless fingers and hit the floor with an aborted squeak. The dog ignored it, too busy growling at the intruder.
I knew exactly how he felt. Zach, I mean. The first time I’d seen Jacquie, after David told me he was leaving me for her, I’d had much the same reaction. I look pretty good for forty, but it’s been a long time since I was twenty-five.
Although that was the past, I reminded myself. I could afford to be gracious. David was dead, I had inherited half his fortune, along with the house in Hillwood and the love-nest in downtown, and Jacquie had been left with nothing.
Or nothing except this ostentatious fur coat, anyway. Arctic fox, hopefully faux.