Jane da Silva knows a Cole Porter tune and a silky voice will only carry you so far through the urbane cabarets of Europe. So when the young widow's "eccentric" Uncle Harold dies, she jets back to the States to claim the fortune she dearly needs to ransom her Visa card. Unfortunately, Jane finds her inheritance conditional and her situation critical. It seems Uncle Harold and his old-codger cronies are part of a secret society dedicated to aiding and abetting offbeat lost causes, and Jane must carry on her uncle's "work" if she expects to see anything resembling a windfall. But just how far will the chic expatriate go when her "hopeless case" forces her to mingle with a sleaze-ball lawyer, a scheming psychiatrist, a sinister New Age cult, a stone-cold corpse--and a ruthless murderer?

Nadia Wentworth is a Hollywood star. A big star. And she's so dreadfully bored on location in the South Pacific, she begins reading the first thing her assistant can dig up: a piece of gloriously bad pulp fiction by 1920s author Valerian Ricardo. Nadia soon falls under the spell of the bewitching Kali-Ra, the Queen of Doom, and knows she must portray the infamous character on the big screen. Ecstatic, she hires a famous British screenwriter to pen the script, and as word leaks out, all sorts of pests start popping up, including: Ricardo's great grandnephew; his elderly "wife"; his biographer, who also happens to be an illegitimate granddaughter; and a gaggle of obsessed Ricardo fans. When someone is murdered, there are scads of suspects, a multitude of motives, and much mayhem in this delightful, laugh-out-loud farce from one of the most accomplished novelists in the genre.

Alice Jordan's dentist husband has just run off with his hygienist and she is desperate for a job. Because Alice has done some volunteer work for the symphony, she manages to talk herself into a job as a commissioned ad rep for a Seattle classical music station. The station was kept alive by its wealthy owner for many years, but her heirs are fighting about the future of the station. KLEG is so mismanaged that Aliceís predecessor Joe Costello hadnít even bothered to resign. He just disappeared and no one, including his unhappy wife, found it odd that he just drifted away. Cryptic messages had been left on his answering machine and his few accounts had been neglected. A week into the job, Joeís body is found inside a convertible sofa in a storage area. Alice finds that Joeís death by misadventure is only the beginning of the mystery.From Library JournalThe rather sleazy quarters of a Seattle classical music station provide the focus for the latest concoction from the author of Death in a Deck Chair (Ivy, 1987). When Alice Jordan, recently deserted by her husband, lands a job at KLEG, she discovers a body in the back room. Easy reading.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsBeck takes a break from her overgalvanized Jane da Silva series (Cold Smoked, 1995, etc.) for a plunge into the even more frenetic world of KLEG-AM, Seattle's dying also-ran classical radio station. New advertising account executive Alice Jordan, who's cadged the job from Caroline Payne Parker, the station's much-married co-owner and nominal manager, arrives on the scene to discover that the program director is a militant vinyl Luddite, the receptionist a megalomaniac, the evening announcer a has-been romeo, the overnight announcer (Teresa, Queen of the Night'') an audiotaped misterioso nobody's ever laid eyes on, and the other owner, Caroline's brother Franklin, a resentful hothead who's ready to sell the whole kit and caboodle to the first psycho who comes up with half a million dollars. About the only person around with any business sense is ad sales manager Ed Costello, and he's dead--folded up in a Murphy bed, presumably by somebody who didn't take kindly to his experiments in prostitution and blackmail. So Alice, whose main qualification for amateur sleuthing is that she's not nuts--weepy and neurotic, maybe, but not nuts''--ends up solving the murder, though, in keeping with the zany spirit of the enterprise, that's far from her intention. A tightly wound farce whose dim view of the station dweebs and ditzes is pursued with comical consistency to the very last line. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Affable young parking valet Tyler Benson, a master of bad timing, is accidentally involved in cases of auto theft and murder on the lot at Alba, an upscale Seattle restaurant. There's a body in a parked car, and someone shooting at tech zillionaire Scott Duckworth. Mysterious Italian beauty Flavia Torcelli and even Tyler's spectacularly unsuccessful dad seem somehow connected to the crime wave. The more Tyler tries to sort things out, the more the police are convinced he's the guilty party. ...Oh, and a collection of inept but homicidal Russian mafiosi seems to be after him, too. "A canny sense of humor and timing... Beck is masterly in pulling all these madcap threads together even as the rollicking suspense threatens to careen out of control (but never does)."—Publishers Weekly (starred review 7/6/15)