[Marisa Adair Mysteries 01] • Murder Takes a Dare · the First Marisa Adair Mystery Adventure (Marisa Adair Mysteries Book 1)

Marisa Adair investigates a brutal murder while she guards her secrets of childhood deprivation and adulthood struggles with addiction as zealously as a bag lady protects battered sacks of scavenged treasures. Marisa is shocked when her unscrupulous friend Jonah is murdered just after he bursts into her office to tell her something of life and death importance. Gyrating with the mad desperation of a forty-year-old stripper with an adult entertainment mogul at her stage, the twisted trail to the murderer is littered by the subsequent executions of an exotic Goth Girl dancer with a taste for black lipstick and blackmail and two eyewitnesses who attempted their own blackmail with fatal results. After Marisa inadvertently causes a riot at an amateur wrestling match with her sexy alter ego, she joins forces with Russell, who may not be the dithering nonentity he seems, and Alex, chief financial officer and chief pain in Marisa's...neck. Parallel to Marisa's investigation, Althea, combat ready after decades of teaching elementary school; Clay, as handsome as he is mysterious; and Esther, reckless grandmother of the murdered dancer, hurl themselves into the investigative melee. The suspects range from Henry, the charismatic religious leader with scandalous secrets of his own and who could have killed the dancer when she chose the path to the stripper pole over the path to righteousness, to Brad Jacobs, an overzealous auditor who perceives the entire state of Kentucky as a "Trick My Hick" reality television show.