Armed and Glamorous (Crime of Fashion Series #6) by Ellen Byerrum

Product Details

Synopsis

Unchallenged, unfulfilled, and unappreciated, fashion reporter Lacey Smithsonian slips on her trench coat and high-heeled gumshoes to pursue a course in private investigation, hoping it will give her a shot at a better job. When a wealthy and erratic D.C. socialite is discovered dead outside the first class, Lacey gets to test her sleuthing skills. Was the victim on her way to share a dangerous secret with Lacey? And what does it have to do with a missing Luis Vuitton vintage custom makeup case? Lacey must mix style with substance to unravel these tangled threads before she, or one of her best friends, gets caught in the sights of a cold blooded killer.

Lacey's Fashion Tip of the Day

When dressing for impressing, choose your most reliable style weapon whether it's drop dead diamonds, killer heels, or pistol whipping pearls.

Biography

"Okay. You. Smithsonian, isn't it? Lacey Smithsonian." She heard a smirk in his voice. "Smithsonian ain't a name, it's a museum. You two related?"

Everyone laughed, except Lacey. Someone was bound to make a crack about her name. The truth, Lacey thought, was that many people had silly names. She kept a little list of all the wild and wonderful names she came across in her own newspaper, names like Hezekiah Witherwax and Jeremiah Fussfield and Cricket Blicksilver and Sherry and Jerry Derryberry and their kids, Gary and Mary.

Lacey blamed her grandfather. A Cockney from London named Smith, he brought his Irish wife to America and decided to fancy up the family name. "Smithsonian" sounded pretty grand to him. If he'd only known the trouble that name would cause me.

"It's my name," she said through her teeth. "It's a long story."

"It's always a long story. Let's start with you anyway. I'm guessing you're not a bounty hunter like Goldstein here. Why are you here?"

Why? It was January, the air was chilly and the trees were bare. In northern Virginia, freezing drizzle was falling on dirty snow. The sky, low and the color of pewter, matched her mood. If Lacey was not having a dark night of the soul, she was at least having a dreary gray wintry afternoon of it. Lacey Smithsonian was a news reporter stuck on the accursed fashion beat and going nowhere, in spite of everything she'd accomplished. Some unexpected adventures, some major scoops, all of which had served only to sentence her to the fashion beat.

That's the problem with being good at the wrong thing, she thought. You get stuck doing it. Stuck in a box and labeled forever. And no one else willtake the job, so why would anyone promote you out of it?

In Washington, D.C., the fashion beat was something The Eye Street Observer couldn't give away with a free toaster. And always hovering around Lacey's consciousness was this: The last fashion editor at The Eye actually died on the job, hunched over her keyboard, her death unheeded on the forgotten fashion beat. Mariah "the Pariah" Morgan, Lacey's predecessor, had been dead for hours when the news editor finally realized his writer who had missed her deadline wasn't just taking her usual nap. She had to be wheeled out of the newsroom in her desk chair in full rigor mortis. The chair came back. Mariah didn't.

It's a proven fact. The fashion beat can kill you.