Ellen Pall

There's nothing like murder to cure a case of writer's block.

Regency romance writer Juliet Bodine is falling into despair. Instead of writing, she spends her days staring at the pages of her unfinished novel, fantasizing about her inevitable failure. So the arrival of an eighty-four-year-old fan with a trove of yellowing papers to show is a welcome diversion instead of the nuisance it might have been.

Demanding, outspoken, stylish, outrageous, and still dripping with sexual flair, Ada Caffrey is everything Juliet is not. But Juliet's bemused delight in her eccentric visitor changes to electric shock when she realizes Ada has stumbled upon a suppressed fragment of the blockbuster memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Regency England's wittiest, most notorious courtesan. One week later, Ada is dead and the manuscript is gone. Could a two-hundred-old sexual indiscretion be worth killing for?

In Slightly Abridged, the second installment in Ellen Pall's Nine Muses mystery series, Juliet teams up with NYPD detective Murray Landis to find out.