Her best friend is Alyce Bohannon who is married to a successful lawyer and lives the ultimate Junior League lifestyle with committees and charity work.

Sometimes Alyce goes with Josie when she's mystery shopping. A trip to Pretty Things and a chance to see the "Halley Blue" scarf that retails for $1,000 becomes a foreshadowing of the disasters to come.

Halley Hardwicke, who was about to take her design business to New York and get out of St. Louis, is murdered just outside the mall where they'd been mystery shopping.

Worse still, Alyce's husband is arrested for the murder!

Soon Alyce is an outcast in her upper-class community, and Josie finds herself reluctantly helping her friend clear her husband of the charge. It's not that she thinks Alyce's husband is capable of murder; it's more that she just doesn't care for the too slick man. She's not sure he really treats his loving wife in a manner Josie thinks is right.

It’s not easy as the two women begin to trace the movements of Halley Hardwicke and those who might want to do her in. Jake Bohannon was having secret meetings with Halley. But Halley, while talented, was certainly not one to leave behind a lot of people who would miss her.

Josie finds jilted lovers, a husband who resented her success and desire to get out and away from him and their daughter, and a lot of women who thought Halley had gotten pretty much what she deserved.

The book is brisk, funny, and full of twists and turns. And not all of them have to do with the mystery. Josie also has to endure her mother's matchmaking attempts. There's the hunky plumber she meets whom she'd really like to get to know better. Then there's Horrible Harry, who is sending her on the most horrendous of the mystery shopper jobs as revenge for her report that got his snotty niece Saber fired from Pretty Things.

If the Greta burgers and the Chunk-a-Chicken don't kill her, there's always a chance that her continued snooping into Halley's life will.