by Lynn Harris
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Praise for Death by Chick Lit
“A smart, fun send-up of the chick lit phenomenon—Lynn Harris’s voice will reel you right in.”—Elizabeth Merrick, editor of This Is Not Chick Lit and author of Girly
“Lynn Harris’s clever and charming novel eviscerates the sillier corners of the New York media world while also providing a fine example of the genre she gently mocks.”—Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad
“Death by Chick Lit is a wickedly funny read offering the rare combination of both teeth and heart.”—Lori Gottlieb, author of Stick Figure
“Death by Chick Lit is a glamorous good time, a whodunit with some very sexy ‘whos,’ and a stiletto sideswipe at the sourpuss anti-chick lit movement—it’s three smart/funny/cool novels in one!”—Rachel Pine, author of The Twins of Tribeca
“Cloning scientists should turn their attention away from sheep and focus on Lynn Harris. After reading her hilarious writing, I’m convinced the world could benefit from a dozen more comic geniuses just like her.”—Andy Borowitz, author of The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers
“Lynn Harris’s latest novel is a full-on, straight-up joy read filled with murder, mayhem, and some solutions for life’s great mysteries, including our relationships with best friends, worst enemies, and the men who truly are our better halves.”—Wendy Shanker, author of The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2007 by Lynn Harris.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / June 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harris, Lynn.
Death by chick lit / Lynn Harris.—Berkley trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-4406-2195-6
1. Women novelists—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—
Fiction. 4. Chick lit. I. Title.
PS3608.A78325D43 2007
813’. 6—dc22
2006102097
http://us.penguingroup.com
For David and Bess
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My profound thanks to Paula Balzer, Kate Seaver, Chris Kalb, Colin Lingle, Betsy Fast, Juliet Eastland, Marjorie Ingall, Wendy Shanker, Carolyn Mackler, Judy Bornstein, Amy Keyishian, Jason Jacobs, Jim Gaylord, Michael Lee, Dixie Feldman, Jim and Florence Harris, Saul and Betty Adelson, Anna Adelson, and, of course, David Adelson, for their invaluable contributions to this book, and to my life.
One
Where on earth was Mimi McKee?
How could she miss her own book party?
Lola Somerville sipped her Mimi-tini and tried not to think evil thoughts.
Well, she tried.
Mimi had not even been a writer writer until now. Before, she’d just been a plucky publicist whose letter to the editor defending the “gay best friend” as a real person, not just a stock character, had scored her a book deal practically overnight. Hence her novel, Gay Best Friend, and the accompanying movie option by Cameron Diaz’s production company. Plus this super-schmancy publication party at Cabin 9—with a drink named after the author, no less.
I will not be petulant, Lola thought. I like Mimi. I have my health. I have wonderful friends. I have a loving husband, and I mean that in a true-life-partner way, not in a “Husband: check!” way. I am happy. So, what? I don’t deserve a supercool book party with free Somerville Slings?
Whoops. Lola caught herself. Positive: 0, Petulant: 1.
Okay, she conceded, I’m just going to think these thoughts once, and then they will be out of my system.
Everyone gets better book parties than mine. Everyone gets better book deals than mine. Everyone’s book gets better buzz than mine. Everyone’s book is ranked higher on Amazon than mine, even when everyone else’s reviews all have only one star. Everyone has an “idea for a book”—or one landing in their lap. Can someone maybe throw me a bone here? How about a call from an editor saying she wants to hear more of my voice? An e-mail from a fancy agent saying, “I’ve seen your work and I’ve got the perfect book idea for you! See six-figure contract, attached.”
Just once, Lola whimpered to herself, can’t I write some random article and
have Jodie Foster phone me, out of the blue, ready to make it into a film? Or jeez, okay, Minnie Driver. Just something.
Lola scowled in the dim light, then held her hand up. Okay, she thought. Done. I’ve met my crappy karma quota for the night.
She hoisted her rotini-twisty red hair—which she’d hated as a kid but now realized was her best asset—into a plastic clip, ten to a pack, from Duane Reade. As Lola frequently observed, she’d be a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman if she were two feet taller and had a different face. Hers, nose included, was rounder and flecked with freckles, though in random positions from her forehead to her chin, not the official “cute” constellation of nose and upper cheeks. But her smile was wide and easy, and her shining green eyes reminded her husband, he often said, of the best olives he’d ever eaten, back on some crazy adventure in Crete with a loaded former roommate. “Whenever I look at you, I think of salt and sun,” he liked to say. “Is there any way you could spend less time blinking?”
Lola scanned the room’s dark log walls. Party guests jammed the bar three deep and reclined here and there on vintage metal bunk beds. Tree-tall waitresses, all midriff, passed Hi-C shots and trays of s’mores. Lola squinted at people’s faces, hard-pressed to make them out. What was that Fox News special report on how women’s health declines more rapidly if they haven’t had at least one baby by age twenty-two? Didn’t they say night vision was one of the first things to go?
Ah! A clue! Somewhere in the swirl, Lola spotted Mimi’s newish boyfriend, Quentin, a good egg if there ever was one, though on the breakable side. Alas, Mimi was not at his side. Quentin excused himself from a clot of well-wishers and headed for a door.
Huh. Guess he’s looking for her, too. Lola knew from her experience with Mimi in book club, which was where they’d met, and which Lola had quit when the group had voted nine to one to reread The Bridges of Madison County on the anniversary of its publication, that Mimi was always twenty minutes early to everything. So where on earth is she? And speaking of missing people, where is Annabel? She totally swore she was coming to give me moral support. And where, for that matter, is my husband, who will take me away from all this and score me a second goody bag?
Lola found an empty spot on a picnic table bench and crossed one painted wooden clog over the other, a little bummed, on top of everything, that she hadn’t worn her favorite cowboy boots on what was likely to be her last cool evening out before the mid-June boot solstice. She yanked her Loehmann’s Black Dress—LBD, as she and Annabel called them—down over her knees and reviewed the evening so far. Her plan had been simply this: congratulate Mimi sincerely, torment herself briefly, and then go out with her husband and her best friend for a bite to eat, if there indeed remained any restaurant nearby that served anything but “small plates.” Okay, Lola thought, one out of three.
She polished off her Mimi-tini, golden-retrievering her tongue into the glass to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
Hmm. Who’s that coming toward me? Lola wondered. As far as she could make out, the figure, head tilted toward a cell phone on her shoulder, was not the object of her guilty umbrage, nor of her recent wedding vows. Hell’s bells, Lola thought. Whoever this is, I am disinclined to make small talk about how my book is going, because it’s not.
“Mimi, it’s me! Where the eff are you?!? Call me the second you get this!” Even over the music, Lola recognized the voice speaking into the phone before the low-ponytailed woman fully emerged from the shadows, clipping along in shoes with toes so pointy they must have just been sharpened. It was Mimi’s approximately eleven-year-old book publicist, Holly Something. Holly, in fact, had been Lola’s book publicist for ten minutes before getting promoted. Spotting Lola, Holly said, “Oh hi, Kim!” and punched up another number on her spangled Sidekick.
Change of scenery—now, thought Lola. She headed for the restroom, wondering vaguely if the party would merit an appearance by the total It Girl Crystal sisters, the hard-partying, cross-dressing heirs to a vast aspartame fortune. She passed knots of Mimi’s friends, professional publishing party attendees, and, notably, Blanca Palette, who was entitled to feel even surlier than Lola. Blanca’s eyes were perpetually downcast—you could just hear an aunt saying, “You’d be so pretty if you’d look up and smile!”—and her ears stuck out from her wispy brown hair (“Have you considered getting a permanent?”). Blanca wrote Serious Books with female protagonists that consistently received reviews along the lines of “Chick lit with brains!” and then sold fewer copies than their lighter counterparts.
Lola felt Blanca’s pain. She had nothing against chick lit itself, or its authors, Mimi included. To her, the catch-all, now-derisive term and the snooty, apocalyptic attitude toward the genre was the problem. Ever since Bridget Jones—whom Lola considered a classic screwball heroine, not some sort of tipsy antipioneer—it seemed that every book written by a woman or with a female protagonist was now labeled chick lit. (While anything written by a guy was, of course, lit.) According to assorted stern reviewers and opinion writers, chick lit—which, like any genre, had its more or less distinguished iterations—was itself responsible for the decline of Western literature. It was, at the very least, “bad for women,” a charge—as Lola herself had written in many letters to the editor that had never been optioned—that implied, condescendingly, that women can’t tell the difference between instruction manuals and entertainment. Some journalists had already declared the genre “dead,” but obviously, editors were still buying, and nothing had stopped that one curmudgeon at the New Yorker from calling the newest edition of The Guns of August “military chick lit.”
The whole matter had hit especially close to home lately for Lola. As a freelance magazine writer and former online advice columnist—who, up until the dot-com bust, had had a pretty serious following—she’d done pretty well for herself. She’d been writing professionally in one form or another since college, where she’d been a bit of a big journo on campus; after that, she’d jumped right into local reporting, eventually breaking into national glossies and their crunchier, more political counterparts. Then came AskLola.com, and then Lola’s illfated tenure at the now-extinct women’s media giant, Ovum, Inc.
Lola’s novel, Pink Slip, was her account—fictionalized into a mystery/thriller/whodunit—of her own successful investigation into Ovum’s villainous wrongdoing and spectacular demise. Her publisher had duly positioned Pink Slip as a “seriously hard-hitting and entertainingly readable exposé: in the truth-through-fiction tradition of Christopher Buckley, a story about the story behind the biggest media scam of our era.” The press, in turn, had labeled it “the hilarious misadventures of America’s newest titian-haired sleuth.”
If this chick lit classification had been accurate—or, frankly, a sales-booster—that would have been fine, Lola had figured. Instead, Pink Slip had gotten neither the pop-commercial success that should have come with the chick lit label nor the writer’s writer accolades that should have come without it. Her agent was ready for her to “try again,” but Lola, who was really proud of Pink Slip, wasn’t quite ready to let go.
Also, she was out of new ideas.
This she knew, at least: no pink in the title. Not even if it was about Communism.
As Lola excuse-me’d her way through the crowd on her way downstairs, bonking into people with the giant shoulder bag that held everything she needed for the day, for the next thirty days, she reflected on the personal progress she’d made over the past few years. She used to call Annabel from the ladies’ room to report on dates. Now she’d call Annabel from the ladies’ room to report on her career. So that was a step. Unfortunately, the news in the career department was, these days, almost always nonexistent.
Marriage doesn’t fix your life, thought Lola. This she had learned.
Lola started to push open the restroom door. No checking voice mail, she resolved; just a quick call to Annabel to make sure she was on her damn way. If Mimi was going to make some sort of grand late entra
nce, she wanted to be there to silently resent it.
Except this wasn’t the restroom.
The cool nightclubs had no sign outside; the really cool nightclubs had no sign outside or on the bathroom doors. Having attended her share of book parties, this wasn’t the first time Lola had walked into a supply closet.
But this was the first time she had sensed something very, very wrong.
I did not just see a foot, Lola thought, opening the door wider to make sure. A chunk of gray light fell in from the hall.
Oh, there’s Mimi.
Covered in blood.
The broken martini glass that had slit her throat lay nearby.
In the 0.03 of a second before she screamed and passed out, Lola felt really, really guilty.
Two
Lola blinked. All she could see was television snow. She blinked again. Her arm ached where she must have smacked the doorframe on her way down; her filmy poncho hadn’t served as much cushion. But the snow was starting to clear, and from her one other experience with fainting—which was the one time she’d tried acupuncture, which she did only because someone said it would help her get a new literary agent, so really, she deserved to have passed out—she knew just what to expect this time. She would blink once again, and then open her eyes to see, clustered above her, a hazy circle of concerned faces: her mother, her husband, Doug, I’kea the bodyworker, Bella, Abzug, and Steve, her Weimaraner mix from childhood. And then everything would be all right. And I’kea, kind soul, wouldn’t even charge her.
Lola went for it. She opened her eyes once more. Ah, there was the cluster of heads.
But hey! They weren’t even looking at her.
Figures, thought Lola, sinking her head back down.
Oh, wait.
She turned her head. That stale, musty smell was not dog breath. The guy in the jacket and tie? Can’t be Abzug: no hat. And the one with rubber gloves? Most certainly not Doug. And—as Lola now finally, clearly, gut-flippingly recalled—someone had performed an altogether less healthy type of bodywork on Mimi McKee.
Lola sat up on her good elbow.
Don’t look don’t look don’t look—uch, you looked.
A gloved EMT was just pulling a sheet over Mimi’s face.
I really, really, need to not be where that body is, Lola thought. Oh, Mimi’s poor mom.