HIDE & SNOOP

Paralegal Odelia Grey (Twice as Dead, 2011, etc.) lands in hot water when her shaky law firm merges with another struggling firm.

When the economy threw a curve at Wallace, Boer, Brown & Yates (known affectionately to its employees as “Woobie”), a merger with Hamlin-Hawke seemed just the ticket to keeping both law firms afloat. Merging staffs means cutting jobs, however, and soon layoffs are the order of the day. After 20 years at Woobie, Odelia sees a target on her back. Her snotty new boss, Erica Mayfield, gives her practically no work, shunting all the billable hours to Mark Baker, the paralegal Erica brought with her from Hamlin. Worse yet, she puts Odelia on Sesame Street duty, leaving her three-year-old niece, Lily Holt, coloring in Odelia’s office day after day. When Lily arrives one day with a suitcase, Odelia puts her foot down, only to find that Erica’s disappeared. Left no choice, Odelia takes the preschooler home, where she charms Odelia’s husband, Greg, her best friend, Zee Washington, and Zee’s lawyer husband, Seth. But a midnight foray to Erica’s house ends when Odelia discovers the dead body of Lily’s mother, Connie, and the paralegal needs legal help herself. Seth gets Odelia out of the slammer, but she realizes it’s only a matter of time before whoever killed Connie comes after her daughter. So she takes time off from her job to track down Connie’s killer, wondering all the while whether she’ll have a job to come back to.

Despite Jaffarian’s flirtations with vampires and ghosts, her original series is still her best. Odelia takes no nonsense from anyone and stops at nothing to give the bad guys what they deserve.