Killer Cuts

March 23, 2009
Near the start of Viets’s hair-raising eighth Dead-End Job mystery (after 2008’s Clubbed to Death
), Helen Hawthorne, who’s working at Miguel Angel’s high-end beauty salon in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., assists Miguel in fluffing and buffing Honey, the pregnant fiancée of Kingman “King” Oden, a notorious gossip blogger and cable TV star. After the couple exchange “I dos” at King’s Hendin Island waterfront palace, someone shoves a drunken King into his pool, where he drowns. Miguel becomes a top suspect in King’s murder after heroin’s found in the hairstylist’s makeup case. To help clear Miguel, Helen investigates other suspects, including Honey and the victim’s two ex-wives. Meanwhile, Helen must cope with anonymous threats in her mail as well as plan her wedding to her PI boyfriend. Viets keeps the action popping until the cliff-hanging ending, as Helen ignores signs that her best-laid plans have a black hole connected to the past she’s been running from for years.