Killer in High Heels

January 22, 2007
Drag queens meet the high-fashion mob in this fun, fast-paced follow-up to Halliday's delectable Spying in High Heels
. A kids' shoe designer whose best creations end up in Payless, Maddie Springer is a down-to-earth blonde whose tough luck with men has her forbidding friends and family to mention her last boyfriend, LAPD detective Jack Ramirez. Her mom had similar luck with Maddie's father, Larry, who ran off to Vegas with a showgirl named Lola when Maddie was three. But when Maddie receives a cryptic plea from Larry on her answering machine—punctuated by a gunshot—she decides to investigate, trekking to Sin City with her voluptuous, well-armed best friend Dana and their gay cohort, Marco. There, they soon discover that Larry and Lola are one and the same, that an innocuous nightclub fronts an ingenious counterfeit shoe scheme and that—naturally—there's a murderer on the loose. This amusing whodunit scores big with inimitable characters like psychic Mrs. Rosenblatt, Maddie's tell-all mom and bad-boy Ramirez, who shows up with some surprises in tow. Maddie's winning return, with her bold comical voice and knack for thinking fast on her strappy slingbacks, will elicit cheers from fans of the growing chick mystery field.