Thrill City

Smart, sexy, and strong-minded Simone Kirsch, ex-stripper and PI, returns in her fourth adventure, and she's up to her neck in lethal fun and games on the writers' festival circuit Bad girl sleuth Simone Kirsch is back in businessand before she has time to crack a bottle of cheap champagne to celebrate the opening of her very own detective agency, she's back in danger. It all starts off quite innocently, when best-selling crime novelist Nick Austin wants to follow her around for a few days as background research for his next novel. But the day after he, his ex-wife, and her new lover all appear on the same panel at a writers festival, his ex-wife is found brutally murdered and Nick disappears, leaving Simone with more trouble than she can handle. While she can take murderous bikers, desperate publishers, poetry slams, and a crystal meth-addicted psycho killer with literary ambitions in her stride, Simone is also juggling her very pregnant and possibly hormonally unbalanced best friend, Chloe; her ongoing attraction to ex-cop Alex; and her boyfriend, Sean, who wants her to give up her agency and move to Vietnam. All in all, life is complicatednot to mention the fact that she's facing the toughest, most dangerous case of her career.

Leigh Redhead is the author of the Simone Kirsch series.