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Elegant, enigmatic private eye Claire Conrad and her very independent assistant, Maggie Hill, are about to fly to Los Angeles when a young woman appears at their discreetly swank New York hotel with a message concerning one world and a video from quite another. "Cybella didn't kill herself," she says, referring to the legendary fashion model whose recent death was judged a suicide, and then leaves with Claire a tape of amateur pornography featuring a glimpse of a red dress and lots of female flesh. Minutes later the young woman collapses and dies in front of the hotel. She certainly didn't kill herself, she was stabbed to death.
Maggie and Claire - together with Boulton, the dashing butler who moonlights as the muscle in this unlikely menage - decide to stick around. Their client won't be paying the bills (she's dead, after all), but they have their own separate reasons for pursuing the truth, and very different ways of doing so. The trail leads from the low-rent life of Times Square's seediest peep shows to the chic halls of Bonton magazine, where the fashions are lipstick-glossy but the veneer of beauty is only skin deep. These are both worlds of hurt - of exploitation and abandonment - and in one or both of them hides a killer.
