[Rep and Melissa Pennyworth 03] • Putting Lipstick on a Pig

Vance Hayes died while joyriding on a snowmobile late one night and breaking through thin ice near the Wisconsin Dells. The cold-hearted, hard-headed lawyer goes unmourned by clients, colleagues, or anyone else-including his reluctant eulogist, fellow attorney Rep Pennyworth. In fact, interest in Hayes' death is merely perfunctory until it inter-sects with the perils facing charmingly ingenuous Vietnamese-American court reporter Sue Key, tied to Milwaukee's Hmong community. Could it be that Hayes died not because of any of the rotten and vicious things he spent his career doing to literally hundreds of people, but because of the one decent, human endeavor that marked his adult life? The situation is further complicated by deer season when for several weeks in the fall, "up north" is home to 700,000 people carrying loaded firearms. And by the presence of a gaggle of lawyers, patrician and plebian, grouped around Indianapolis and Milwau-kee, not to mention a private eye, an e-tailer into books, and a seedy photographer. Can Rep and his shrewd wife Melissa find in them the key to solving the puzzle of Vance Hayes' death?

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers, or at least one. . . . Vance Hayes died late one night when his snowmobile broke through thin ice near the Wisconsin Dells. The cold-hearted, hard-headed lawyer is unmourned by clients, colleagues, or anyone else--including his reluctant eulogist, fellow attorney Rep Pennyworth.

Interest in Hayes' death is truly perfunctory until it intersects with peril facing charmingly ingenuous Vietnamese-American court reporter Sue Key, tied to Milwaukee's Hmong community. Could Hayes have died not because of any of the rotten and vicious things he spent his career doing to literally hundreds of people, but because of the one decent, human endeavor that marked his adult life?

The situation is complicated further by deer season when several weeks in the fall, 700,000 people carrying loaded firearms head "up north." And by the presence of a gaggle of lawyers, patrician and plebian, grouped around Indianapolis and Milwaukee, not to mention a private eye, an e-tailer into books, and a seedy photographer. Can Rep and his shrewd wife Melissa find in them the key to solving the puzzle of Vance Hayes' death?