"Amusing mystery"

Nobody wants to make an enemy of their hairdresser, so when her stylist Stella Lake asks her friend Lacey Smithsonian to attend a viewing, she goes. The dead woman is a young hairdresser named Angie who has a bald do and cut wrists. The police think she committed suicide especially with the bloody note written on her mirror in the salon. Stella knows that Angie was murdered and she wants her reporter friend Lacey to prove it.

Lacey is a fashion columnist not an investigative reporter and at first rejects the idea out of hand. After thinking about it, she realizes that Angie's hair is missing. She writes a column about Angie and through a combination of circumstances finds herself in the middle of the investigation especially when another hair dresser dies and Lacey is the only one who sees the link. She continues to dig for information and ends up being stalked by a killer who wants to make her his next victim.

The protagonist's running commentary on social mores in Washington D.C. is hilarious and her pithy observations about fashion and its relationship with scandal, the law and murder will have readers in tears of laughter (don't wear fashionable mascara). The who-done-it is intelligently plotted and there is a plethora of suspects who could be the guilty party. The audience will go crazy trying to figure out who the killer is while the heroine goes nuts trying to figure out if a sexy security guard from her past is interested in her or her murder theory.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted August 1, 2003

Summary

Home of the helmet hairdo and congressional comb-over, Washington, D.C. is a hotbed of fashion faux pas. If anyone should know, it's "Crimes of Fashion" columnist Lacey Smithsonian. She dishes out advice to the scandal-scorched and clothing-clueless, doing her part to change this town— one fashion victim at a time...

Can a bad haircut kill you?
An up-and-coming stylist, Angie Woods had a reputation for rescuing down-and-out looks—and careers—all with a pair of scissors. But when Angie is found with a drastic haircut and a razor in her hand, the police assume she committed suicide over the shear disaster. Lacey knew the stylist and suspects something more sinister—that the story may lie with Angie's star client, a White House staffer with a salacious Web site. Or with a recent string of thefts at the salon. With the help of a hunky ex-cop, Lacey must root out the truth—before she becomes the next subject of a hostile makeover...

Lacey's Fashion Tip of the Day:
Never wear pink to testify. (Lacey has complicated feelings about pink.)