PERISH BY PEDICURE is the eighth installment in Nancy J. Cohen's Bad Hair Day Mystery series. Marla Shore, hairstylist and salon owner, is invited to work at a Hair Show by Georgia Rogers, a friend from college. Georgia works with a group of people who demonstrate and sell hair products for their company, Luxor, at the shows. Georgia is flying in to stay with Marla while in town for the show.
At the last minute Marla finds out that her fiancรฉ's former in-laws are coming to town. Dalton, homicide detective and fiancรฉ to Marla, is a widow and is trying to move on with his life. His late wife's possessions are packed up around the house, so he doesn't feel comfortable having her parents stay with him. Dalton asks Marla if she would mind letting his former in-laws stay at her house. Marla is not comfortable with this idea. She already is having Georgia as a house guest and now she will need to accommodate two people she doesn't even know.
Marla goes to a cocktail party to meet all the people she will be working with. The next day, one of Marla's new coworkers from Luxor turns up dead in their hotel room and Georgia was the last person to see them. When Marla finds out that numerous employees had personal problems with the employee who died, everyone becomes a suspect. Will Marla survive the Hair Show or will the killer get to her before it's too late? Is Georgia the same friend that Marla knew in college or is she the killer?
While investigating her co-workers, Marla still has a house full of unwanted house guests to deal with. If Marla marries Dalton, she will become a step mother to Dalton's daughter Brianna. Brianna's grandparents are not happy with this since they are still overcome with grief from their daughter's death. While staying at Marla's house they criticize everything she does, from house keeping, to cooking, to her parenting skills with Brianna. How will Marla keep her sanity and find the killer?
PERISH BY PEDICURE was a very enjoyable read. This was my first experience with Cohen's series and I liked that I was able to read it without knowledge of the previous books. With a large cast of characters, this book kept me guessing on who the killer was until the very end. Cohen's book is perfect to curl up with next to a fireplace on a rainy day. I highly recommend this book to fans of cozy mysteries. I look forward to reading the rest of the books in this fun series.
Fire up the flat iron and break out the bullet-proof blow drier, because Marla Shore—the sassy, South Florida beauty salon owner with a knack for fixing hair and finding trouble—is back. Now, just as her fiancé Detective Dalton Vail’s famously uptight former in-laws are descending on her equally famously chaotic home, Marla is up to her roots in a big-time beauty show that could make or break her in more ways than one… Perish By Pedicure Beauty shows are known for a lot of things: glitz, glamour, products, catfights, very big-bordering-on-scary hair “creations”, and some equally oversized egos. What they’re not usually known for is cold-blooded murder, but that’s exactly the case when Luxor Products company director Christine Parks is found dead in her hotel room— facedown in a foot bath. And suspect number one is Marla’s college roommate, Georgia Rogers. It was Georgia who got Marla the job working behind the scenes at the beauty show. The least Marla can do is try to clear her name. One thing is clear: Christine Parks didn’t make many friends. Everyone who worked with the miserable woman had a reason to hate her. From serial cheating to indulging in blackmail, threats, lawsuits, bad investment advice and worse, she was a walking Bad Hair Day, and the list of possible suspects is longer than a pop diva’s hair extensions. The questions swirling through Marla’s expertly coiffed head are pure chaos: Who hated Christine strongly enough to kill her? Did someone slip her poison at their company cocktail party? And is it possible that Dalton's ex-in-laws could be more annoying and disapproving? Dealing with her own domestic crises is going to have to take a back seat to solving a crime that’s getting more complicated—and deadlier—by the day. When a model with top- secret information for Marla turns up dead at the Russian baths, things go from bad to worse in a hurry. Behind the thumping house music and dazzling, high-platform hair tricks of Florida’s hottest beauty show, something very ugly is going down, something that goes beyond polish and style to the dark heart of corruption, greed, and killer- takes-all ambition of the beauty biz. And if Marla isn’t careful, she just may end up on the wrong end of a murderer’s very skilled hands…
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