Welcome to New York in the 1980s, where the best thing about being obsessed with real estate is that you can count on it to arise in conversation about every ten minutes. Nina Fischman mostly opts out of those She's too busy running down to Housing Court on behalf of her poverty law clients, and tracking down sales on sweaters that camouflage the hips. But Nina's mother, Ida, has a nose for the market, and that nose gets twitchy when old ladies in her neighborhood start dying, leaving apartments that have miraculously escaped what New Yorkers delicately call "the cockroach problem." Someone's making a killing in real estate.

Nina Fischman has dated plenty of lifes losers, but she has always steered clear of actual crazed killers. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Nina's friend Susan, whose habit of making bad choices in the Man Department has turned deadly. Unfortunately, Susan left few clues about her final, fatal all Nina knows about him is that he wears contact lenses, likes to hike, and reads the New York magazine personals column. To catch the killer, the cops agree to provide back-up while Nina supplies the bait, in the form of a hike-happy personals ad.

An alternate executor of Helen Hirsch's estate, Nina Fischman finds herself in charge of more than money when Helen's son, Mark, mysteriously dies and Mark's teenaged daughter asks Nina to solve his murder. Reprint.

Luckily, being trapped with a bunch of depressed New Yorkers on a a rainy day on Fire Island is Nina's idea of fun. The vacation buddies are stuck in the house with one killer topic of conversation—murder. The hunt is on for the killer of the man who had organized their house share, and the prime suspect is the man showing an interest in Nina.

When a corpse is found in her boyfriend Jonathan's double-parked car, New York lawyer Nina Fischman encounters a mailman moonlighting as a pimp, among other obstacles, on her way to catch a killer. Reprint.

This is the latest mystery featuring Nina Fischman, that witty Upper West Side lawyer who's slipping out of her thirties, still on a diet and without a boyfriend. Just three months after Nina gave up everything to follow her boyfriend Jonathan to California, she is back in New York—single, jobless, living with her mother and ready to start all over again. But the doldrums quickly subside when her brother-in-law, the dermatologist, becomes a murder suspect. Ken was involved in a real estate deal with Andy, the dead man, a scientist whose researches involved animal experimentation, and he seems to have been poisoned—just what Nina needed. She and her equally irrepressible mother Ida can't keep their noses out of trouble and start their own investigation. Whodunit? The dead man's striking wife? Andy's lab colleagues? The animal activist? Ken? And can Nina figure it all out as the clues fall into place? You bet.