Bad Manners

"I wouldn't have minded so much being naked on the cover of the National Enquirer if I'd been thinner", says Santa Bianca Chief of Detectives Lilly Bennett. Caught with a California judge by a sleazy photographer and threatened with (full) exposure in the tabloids, Lilly calls it quits with her lover and her job. Now she's back home in Wyoming, where men are men, women wear cowboy boots, and murder will be right up her alley in Bad Manners, a hilarious, fast-moving mystery set in the new American West. Lilly intends to start a high-tech international security firm that will link Roundup, Wyoming, to the four corners of the world. Then she lands her first case right in the neighborhood. Walter Butterfield, the richest, meanest man in town, gets a surprise at his birthday bash - his head blown off by a shotgun. Lilly's job is to find out who did it: his troubled daughter, Ellen, who is discovered holding the weapon; his loud-voiced, big-bosomed second wife, Pamela, who isn't even smudging her mascara with a tear; his mistress, a six-foot tall rodeo trick rider, who is bawling her eyes out; or none of the above. The latest in wireless wire-tapping lets Lilly listen in on the raunchy goings-on at Butterfield's ranch among the New West's nouveau riche. But space-age equipment can't replace Lilly's cop instincts. While her libido leads her into a dangerous liaison of her own, her hunches are sending her down a twisted trail into the past and to the long-buried secrets someone would kill to keep.