Searching for the murderer of a famous author, sexy, sassy Phryne goes undercover-and is up to her ears in fashion gossip and office politics....

Phryne Fisher is asked to investigate the puzzling death of a famous author and illustrator of fairy stories. To do so, she takes a job within the women's magazine that employed the victim and finds herself enmeshed in her colleagues' deceptions.

But while Phryne is learning the ins and outs of magazine publishing first hand, her personal life is thrown into chaos. Impatient for her lover Lin Chung's imminent return from a silk-buying expedition to China, she instead receives an unusual summons from Lin Chung's family followed by a series of mysterious assaults and warnings.

Reviews

Phryne Fisher isn’t really a glossy girl, she’s just pretending to be one to solve the suspicious death of an old luvvie who wrote and illustrated fairy stories for a women’s magazine. Not exactly riveting reading by today’s standards, but this story is set in the 20s when women read articles on how to be virtuous, and never ventured out without a hat or gloves. Greenwood manages to evoke the elegance of the era in this charming tale, which dwells as much on the wardrobe of the heroine as the morbid details of murder and mayhem. –Vogue Magazine, June 2001

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Phryne Fisher is a character whose personality falls somewhere between gentle femininity and hard-boiled forensic capabilities. It is a combination which celebrates the emerging individual women of the 1920s.-- Weekend Australian

I loved this book.... its central character is a cool, elegant, sharply intelligent female sleuth called Phryne Fisher, whose glamour belies the fact that she is both fierce and fiercely independent. -- City Weekly

Phryne infiltrates the staff of Women's Choice with all the aplomb of Lord Peter Wimsey taking on the advertising game, casually dispensing balm to fragile egos and down-to-earth fashion advice while she penetrates the secrets of the magazine's agony page and follows a tortuous trail of clues to a suitably unexpected conclusion. -- Adelaide Advertiser