The Girl with a Curl

When the newly married Lexie Royce and Steve Wright (the principals in Murder for Old Times’ Sake) learn that Antoinette “Tawny” Delamarter died of poison at Scuttlebutt’s, a gentlemen’s club in Fort Wayne, they merely note it in passing. After all, Tawny -- the skank of the Carroll High School class of ’94, an exotic dancer with a “generous” reputation -- was not a friend. But then, they learn, Tawny is survived by a teen-aged daughter, Jacintha Caitlin, who is on a quest to find her biological father. Her only clue is a scrapbook Tawny had hidden for sixteen years. Lexie is always ready to help an ugly duckling. The girl’s transformation into a beautiful princess is the stuff of fairy tales. But like a fairy tale, the transformation is punctuated with evil in all its darkest forms, including murder, threatening the lives not only of Lexie but many others. The murderer has been too clever for the legal system. If the police can’t bring the evil to an end, who will? Two silver mementoes that were never meant to be found hold the answer for the unlikeliest of kinsman avengers.