PJ Santini…is the love child of Janet Evanovich and Elmore Leonard. Lynne Russell’s spunky private eye had me at PJ’s peeing into a one-pound coffee can during stakeouts. -Toronto Star Talk about a Renaissance woman, Lynne Russell does it all! -Warner Bros. Television A news anchor with the personality of a professional wrestler. -The New York TimesABOUT THIS BOOKNo good deed goes unpunished. It puts you in the crosshairs. Of a murder rap, or a Meaningful Domestic Relationship. Which is more dangerous? PJ Santini, private investigator and television news reporter, is dusting off her Louboutin stilettos after a 2 a.m. cemetery shootout in Buffalo, NY. Already, her tanned, toned PI boss’s new society divorce case is turning into a homicide investigation. It may kill her, but it won’t get in the way of Chianti and pasta. Ma cooks. Pop works Cold Cases in the basement between meals. PJ wants those leggings that compress fat, pushing blood up to your temples and swelling your lips to new fullness with a perky smile that looks like you’re passing gas. Her Sicilian Nonna, whose specialty is revenge, is jilted by her lover and invents Bidet therapy. Her connected cousin, Sandro The Eel DiLeo, needs a favor. What could go wrong?ABOUT THE AUTHORLynne Russell anchored CNN for 18 years, the first woman to anchor a regular network nightly newscast, over 33,000 of them. For her unbiased dedication to the People’s Right to Know, The New York Times called her a just-the-facts stalwart of CNN Headline News . They also called her a news anchor with the personality of a professional wrestler, which she took as a compliment. In the Washington Journalism Review: a spot as Best in the Business. A private investigator, double black belt, and former Deputy Sheriff, Lynne now writes romantic crime novels. She and her husband live near Washington, D.C. and in Italy.ABOUT PJ SANTINIPJ Santini lives in an uncharted corner of Lynne’s brain. When PJ spends long, boring hours stuck in a car on a surveillance job, she amuses herself by counting all the places on her body where she can stash her gun - she’s up to twelve, now - and she wishes to thank Lynne for the idea. It helps to make up for the indignity of having to pee into a one-pound coffee can.EXCERPT © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved CHAPTER ONE - The morning after So how was your night? I asked him, gulping Colombian roast from a diner mug with somebody else’s lipstick on it. On general principles, I try to start off the day not remembering what I did the night before, even if it was my fault. Men do this, and they wind up carrying a lot less baggage into the morning. For men, every day is a new adventure. Nothing we think we taught them in the previous twenty-four hours makes it through the night. But I knew exactly how Daly’s night had gone. We’d been caught up in the moment, mixing business with pleasure, and things had gotten so far out of hand, I was going to have to retire the number on my favorite French lace red teddy. I was trying hard not to think of it as love. But who wouldn’t fall for him? By breakfast we - my private detective boss, Tango Daly, and I - had put ourselves back together and had gone on to wrap up the paperwork on the 2 a.m. graveyard shootout. We hadn’t hung around Buffalo’s oldest and finest cemetery to talk to the cops, and they still hadn’t come for our version. Why not? The coffee was cooling off fast under the paddle fans, and the guy in the next booth was having trouble lighting another cigarette in the breeze. This worried me, because only a cop would chain smoke in a place like this, with No Smoking signs everywhere, and not even order toast. He also was making notes while we talked. Daly caught it, too. Somebody obviously thought, maybe hoped, that there’d be more to our story than we’d write into our official report, and they could charge us with …
