Claire Conrad & Maggie Hill

After a suicide, two oddball female sleuths investigate a coin collection that is anything but small change Maggie Hill's life has become temporary. Her marriage was temporary, her jobs are temporary, and if work doesn't pick up, her time in California might be temporary, too. Her latest employer is Ellis Kenilworth, an aging coin expert with a first-rate collection and a tenth-rate family. One morning, he has Maggie type up a codicil to his will, changing the document so that his million-dollar rare-coin collection goes not to his kin, but to a woman named Claire Conrad. By the end of the day, the codicil has vanished, and Kenilworth has killed himself with a shotgun.   When the hyena-like family starts to circle Maggie, she reaches out to Conrad. The heiress is an eccentric private detective who wears only black and whiteand whose sense of honesty is as clear-cut as her wardrobe. Together, they fight to protect an old man's final wish, battling against a family so greedy that they would steal the coins right out of the dead man's hand.

A former supermodel takes a fatal tumble, and only the unlikely duo Claire and Maggie can say who pushed her Women like Cybella are not destined to survive their fifties. Her looks long gone, the ex-supermodel takes a leap down a stairwellan apparent suicide that lands her on the front page one last time. Maggie Hill and her employer, the eccentrically brilliant detective Claire Conrad, are about to leave New York when a streetwalker named Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Murphy barges into their hotel room, clutching a tape that she claims proves the model was murdereda tawdry bit of pornography starring Jackie and Cybella's daughter. Conrad is unimpressed, but Jackie gets her attention on her way out of the hotel, when an unseen killer stabs her to death in the street.   Discovering the truth behind the two murders will take Maggie and Claire on a trip to the ugliest corners of New York City, and show them that there is no back alley as dangerous as a high-fashion catwalk.