OVER HER DEAD BODY

Trust-fund freelancer Bailey Weggins has lost her true-crime job at Gloss magazine, but there are just as many corpses down the street at Buzz.

Though it’s more like People than Cosmopolitan, Buzz is marked by the same combination of smiling gossip, great hair and homicide that Bailey got used to (’Til Death Do Us Part, 2004, etc.) before she started covering celebrity crime. Amazingly, it’s not till six weeks after Bailey’s arrival that tyrannical Mona Hodges, the wall-eyed Wookie who lords it over Buzz, is murdered during a reception in the adjoining Track offices for Mexican/Danish singer/actress Eva Anderson. Naturally, it’s Bailey who finds the body, and, naturally, she doesn’t want to tell New York’s finest that she’d come back to the office after hours to retrieve some papers for her friend Robby Hart, whom Mona had just canned. The police suspect Robby, then they don’t. Bailey suspects trashy reality-show queen Kimberly Chance, then Eva’s hostile publicist Kiki Bodden, Mona’s husband Carl Hodges, Mona’s probable successor Nash Nolan and, eventually, Eva herself. But the real question in this weightless mystery isn’t Who Done It? but Where Is He?—the fun summer fling who’ll make Bailey forget her last abandonment. He turns out to be documentary filmmaker Beau Regan, whom Bailey’s convinced she’s going to marry!!!

Bonus: inside information like the news that “the St. Regis is probably one of the most expensive hotels in New York.”