An exhausted Patience McKenna is attending a benefit at a Baltimore bookstore as part of a ten-city tour arranged by a do-gooder publicist and a mega-rich donor. It's for a good cause, but she's more than ready to head back home to New York and hit the sack. At least they're serving refreshments.
Then, as she's chatting with a fan, McKenna's foot bumps the body of a priggish local bibliophile hidden beneath the book-signing table. The deceased woman had been widely disliked, but would a literary luminary have actually gone to the trouble of killing her?
