INVITATION TO A KILLER

Virginia mystery writer Augusta Hawke reluctantly accepts an invitation to a dinner that might have been designed specifically to make her wish she’d stayed home.

Calypso Moore, one of the few people to come to Augusta’s latest book signing, is looking for a ghostwriter for the memoir she plans. Augusta couldn’t be less interested, but she still has questions. Why does Callie want to write, or not write, a memoir? And what does she have to say that anybody would want to read? The answers—Callie’s tired of living in the shadow of Tommy, her lobbyist husband, and intends to bolster her campaign to be appointed ambassador to Mandrekka by publishing a high-profile book, and she’s got lots of juicy stories to share, like the one about her Aunt Davinia’s fling with Prince Charles (as he was then known)—intrigue her just enough to take Callie up on her invitation to a dinner whose guests include high-powered D.C. literary agent Rem Larsson, celebrity surgeon David Burke, sought-after one-name stylist Montana, CIA agent Felicity Overstone and her invisible husband, Fred, and disgraced congressman Carnegie Hilton and his wife, Mary. Before the evening is over, Doc Burke will have died of a heart attack that will fool virtually every character in the book and absolutely no readers. When Augusta finally decides that he was probably poisoned, it’s too late to prove it, and she can only hunt down his estranged wife in Sierra Leone, ask questions about the car accident that killed his fiancee many years ago, and hope that one of the many guilty-looking suspects actually turns out to be guilty. Eventually one of them does, and no, it’s not the one you thought.

Flaming piffle, like the baked Alaska that provides a distraction from the poisoning.