MAGGIE NEEDS AN ALIBI

If only she hadn’t canceled her last appointment with Dr. Bob. One missed session with her therapist and bestselling mystery-writer Maggie Kelly’s gone over the edge; she thinks that her Regency hero, the “damnable, damned sexy” Alexandre Blake, Viscount Saint Just, and his aide-de-camp Sterling Balder have materialized in her living room, determined to torment her with their 19th-century take on 21st-century urban life. As days pass and the two time-travelers remain, they comment freely and rather imperiously on Maggie’s foibles: her inability to shake loose of slimy ex-boyfriend Kirk Toland (whose Toland Books publishes the Saint Just oeuvre); her loyalty to best friend Bernice Toland-James (her editor as well as Kirk's ex); her trust in agent Tabitha Leighton (who negotiates contracts first and tells Maggie the amount later); even her dependence on Dr. Bob. Meanwhile, Saint Just has ventured forth to experience firsthand the joys of New York, buying a fake ID from a couple a street thugs named Killer and Snake, and getting Maggie’s doorman, Argyle Jackson, an audition for an off-Broadway musical. When Kirk keels over dead of mushroom poisoning after dining chez Maggie, Saint Just is just the man she needs to help clear her name—even if the task requires him to cross swords with Lieutenant Steve Wendell of the NYPD, whose longing glances at Maggie warn Saint Just that Wendell wants to look into more than her alibi.

Despite its over-the-top premise, romance-writer Michaels’s maiden voyage into mystery is deeply conventional.