Patience McKenna

When a literary agent is murdered, every bodice-ripping author is a suspect The nation's most famous romance authors are often so over-the-top that they could star in their own work. Catty, eccentric, and vain, they live to make each other miserable-and Patience McKenna does all she can to stay out of their line of fire. Too smart for her own genre, she writes romance novels to pay the rent and investigates stories to stay sane. Now the romance wars are about to hit her on the home front.   A few nights before the start of the annual American Writers of Romance conference, Pay comes home to find her apartment locked from the inside. When the police break down the door, they stumble onto Julie Simms, literary agent to the leading lights of romance, lying dead on the floor. When the conference convenes, Pay asks: Which of her colleagues has traded make-believe passion for real-life murder?

On her first day at a new office, McKenna is greeted with a corpse. Writing Enterprises makes Patience McKenna sick. A onetime romance novelist, she has recently vaulted into the arena of true crime - a happy side effect of being too close to a high-profile murder. Writing Enterprises preys on wannabes, offering vanity publishing, bogus "literary services," and, worst of all, the insipid Writing Magazine. When Writing profiles several of McKenna's novelist friends, they want someone they trust to edit the copy. With great hesitation, McKenna takes the job. She's only been in the office a half hour when a corpse falls out of her closet. Clearly, Writing has some skeletons in the closet. McKenna has never liked this company, but now that she knows there's a killer in the office, she has no choice but to take him or her down.

McKenna investigates the first casualty in a New York literary war. The romance boom has ended, and the women who made fortunes writing bodice-rippers are now scribbling mysteries instead. When the genre's "true" authors fight back, a battle breaks out in every high-class gin joint in Manhattan. It is take-no-prisoners fighting, and Patience McKenna is caught in the middle. This ex-romance author has just turned to true crime writing when Sarah English comes to visit. A would-be romance writer from the Great Plains, English is dowdy, wide-eyed, and naïve - but she is about to toughen up. When a fading romance writer gets pushed in front of a subway train, English is among the suspects. To prove her new friend innocent, McKenna will need the skills gleaned in both her literary genres.

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?

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.