It's hard being Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary. And if I didn't know that already, Bonita, my legal secretary supreme and secondary therapist, kept reminding me.

“Carita,” she said, shaking her head and handing me the pink highlighter at my hyperventilated request so that I could mark another obscure legal point I needed to memorize for my upcoming appellate argument. “You make this so much more difficult than it needs to be.”

So spank me, I'm a lawyer and complicating things at a high hourly rate is my specialty.

Sometimes being a lawyer sucks. That's what Lilly Cleary thinks. Lilly is tough–as–nails attorney who works for a big firm in Sarasota, Florida, and an obsessive–compulsive health nut who has a bad habit of tripping over dead bodies. This time out she's got her hands full with a psychic client and a Nazi–next–door neighbor, when an obnoxious partner in her firm is murdered. Somehow Lilly gets dragged into investigating and encounters a world–class assortment of weirdo suspects, all of whom have good reason to want to knock the guy off.

Claire Matturro