A Job To Kill For by Janice Kaplan, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Los Angeles interior designer Lacy Fields, decorator to the stars, gets a chance to use her hobby as an amateur sleuth once again in A Job To Kill For, the second mystery in this series by Janice Kaplan.

Lacy's latest job is to decorate the new penthouse of billionaire tycoon, Roger Crawford, and his latest wife Cassie. When Cassie meets with Lacy to view the final touches, Cassie checks everything, including the refrigerator where she is delighted to find a few bottles of her favorite tea. Offering Lacy a bottle that she politely declines, Cassie proceeds to take a drink and moments later is dead. The tea had been poisoned and Lacy was the last person to see Cassie alive. The police put her name atop the suspect list. But there are others who had access to the penthouse. Molly, Lacy's best friend from college, and billionaire Roger were seen going into the penthouse the evening before the murder, though Roger claims he had not yet been given a key. Questions definitely needed to be answered, but Lacy thinks the police are asking all the wrong questions to all the wrong people. She knows that if she can cross the threshold of a flea market and zero in on an unrefined treasure, she can make use of her obvious deduction and reasoning skills in locating a killer.

A Job To Kill For is a fresh, light-hearted, at times even droll, mystery that provides great escapist entertainment. The narrative is fast-paced and the plot pleasingly complex without being convoluted. As is typical of this subgenre, special attention is paid to who is wearing which designer and how smart it all looks. But Kaplan enriches her story with Lacy's family life ("Work hard while you are working, but give 110 percent to family when you are at home.") that admittedly suffers when she adds detecting to her day job of decorating. Though her husband and children don't have a lot of face time, as it were, they are an integral and memorable asset to the story.

Special thanks to guest reviewer Betty of The Betz Review for contributing her review of A Job To Kill For.

Acknowledgment: Touchstone provided a copy of A Job To Kill For for this review.

A Job To Kill For

A Lacy Fields Mystery by Janice Kaplan