"excellent amateur sleuth"

Bubbles Yablonsky is not having an easy time of it because she told her one time lover photojournalist Steve Stiletto that she will not marry him. Instead she plans to remarry her former husband Dan who she loathes; he is blackmailing her by threatening a custody suit over their daughter with their psychiatrist as a witness that Bubbles is an unfit mother. Bubbles cannot understand why Dan insists on marrying someone he knows hates him, but he does.

While visiting at the local House of Beauty, Debbie Shatsky suddenly keels over and drops dead. The police believe that owner Sandy used the wrong glue (Debbie had an allergy to latex and needed latex free glue) to do the victim's hair instead of the one that Debbie brought with her. Bubbles believes this was not e negligent accident, but instead a murder by a cold blooded killer to make Sandy look guilty. She runs her theory by her editor who believes the official verdict while Santa stalks her. Death attempt incidents occur as someone wants Bubbles dead, but she has no idea why just like she cannot comprehend Dan's motive to marry her.

A Bubbles Yablonsky mystery is always a treat to read and this installment is probably the best yet in one of the more superior series on the market today because the heroine is so clueless about the murder, the attempts on her life, and most unsettling Dan's motivation to marry her. Readers like this reviewer assume there is a connection between the three scenarios, but the pleasure of this mystery is to find out what it is and the only way to know that is to read this delightful novel. That is no hardship as BUBBLES ALL THE WAY is an amusing and exhilarating mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted November 5, 2006

Summary

The Agatha Award-winning series returns with a new tale of suspicions, steel-town secrets, and homicide by hair product...

For years the local ladies of Lehigh, Pennsylvania, have wished aloud that Debbie Shatsky would meet an untimely end—so they could get their hands on Phil Shatsky, sports-hating, dinner-cooking, massage-giving husband extraordinaire. But when Debbie drops in to the House of Beauty for hair extensions and dies from a lethal reaction to the glue, it's salon owner Sandy who gets the blame. Best friend Bubbles Yablonsky, reporter and sleuth, is determined to investigate further—despite distractions from Steve Stiletto, the love of her life. And from her ex-husband Dan, who is pressuring her to remarry for the sake of their recently traumatized daughter. And from a mysterious Santa Claus, who warns her not to cry, not to pout and not to scream...when he tries to kill her.