Murder, mayhem, and other unladylike behaviour erupt at the Third Annual Conference of American Writers of Romance where author Patience McKenna finds herself caught in an intrigue that would horrify her readers. This Edgar-nominated whodunit is a behind-the-scenes look at the romance business - authors, agents, editors, publishers, and fans.

"Alida Brookfield, the magazine's owner-publisher, considered the financially exciting possibilities of her readership. There would always be people who couldn't write but wanted to be writers. There would always be people whose personal get-rich-quick fantasy was to produce the next sex-and-sin bestseller in their sleep. There would always be people who didn't know the score." "McKenna knew the score, harbored no illusions. When she went to work for Writing Enterprises, she fully expected to uncover skeletons in closets. What she didn't expect to find, especially on her first day, was a dead body."—BOOK JACKET.

Midlist mystery and romance writers are outraged when quite a few romance authors, in a declining market for their own genre, turn to the new hybrid of Romantic Suspense-a move that takes the New York literary world by storm and sends mystery and romance sales plummeting. Is this grounds for murder? When the newly minted romantic suspense writer Verna Train lands on the subway tracks just ahead of the Lexington Avenue Local, Patience McKenna, romance novelist-turned-true crime writer, is in the ideal field to investigate.

A "tour de force" mystery in the Edgar Award-nominated series featuring a writer who not only covers murder cases, but cracks them too (Publishers Weekly). An exhausted Patience McKenna is attending a benefit at a Baltimore bookstore as part of a ten-city tour arranged by a do-gooder publicist and a mega-rich donor. It's for a good cause, but she's more than ready to head back home to New York and hit the sack. At least they're serving refreshments. Then, as she's chatting with a fan, McKenna's foot bumps the body of a priggish local bibliophile hidden beneath the book-signing table. The deceased woman had been widely disliked, but would a literary luminary have actually gone to the trouble of killing her? Fortunately, McKenna's background as a true crime writer will enable her to examine the evidence and help the police turn the page on this case, in a twist-filled, witty mystery by Orania Papazoglou, aka Jane Haddam, author of the Gregor Demarkian Holiday series. "Sophisticated adventure edged with terror... [A] smash finale." —Publishers Weekly "Patience is likably wry company." —Kirkus Reviews

Back in her hometown, McKenna quickly remembers why she left Waverly, Connecticut, has turned its back on most modern conveniences. It has no cinema, no strip malls, no supermarket. Groceries are nearly an hour’s drive away, along spotty two-lane roads that get blocked the moment snow starts to fall. True-crime writer Patience McKenna, on her way to Waverly for her wedding, remembers the roads well enough to navigate the patch ice. Her hometown feels lost in time, but on this trip, it will be anything but boring. Bloody, yes, but never dull. An old-money quarrel over a piece of land turns violent just a few days before her wedding. Members of McKenna’s family start dropping, and while the world may be better off without her crackpot relatives, Pay needs to clean up the mess. She wanted a white wedding—not one that’s blood red.