Izzy Spellman, a twenty-eight-year-old amalgamation of Nancy Drew and Bridget Jones, launches her career as a private investigator while working for the firm of her outlandishly dysfunctional family. A first novel. Reprint.

"Previously published as The last word."

Targeted by the members of her dysfunctional family for control over Spellman Investigations after staging a retaliatory takeover, Izzy is wrongly accused of embezzling funds from a wealthy Alzheimer's patient.

Former wild child Izzy Spellman has finally agreed to take over the family business, and the transition won't be a smooth one.

Dave, I just finished the first chapter of a new novel-a real crime novel with a dead body and all-and I thought of you... Paul and Lacey Hansen are pot-growing, twentysomething siblings sharing a modest rambler of a home in rural Northern California. When they find a headless corpse on their property they can't exactly call 911, so they simply move the body to another location. Let somebody else find it. Instead, the corpse reappears on their land. Clearly, someone is sending them a message, and it's getting riper by the day. But that's only half of the story... Enter authors Lisa Lutz and David Hayward-former real-life partners (professionally and personally) who have agreed to reunite for a tag- team mystery novel written in alternating chapters. One little problem: they disagree on pretty much every detail of how their novel should unfold. While the body count rises in Paul and Lacey's wildly unpredictable fictional world, so too does the intensity of Lisa and David's rivalry. The result is a literary brawl like no other, and a murder mystery every bit as unanticipated (and bloody).

Private investigator Isabel Spellman is back on the case and back on the couch. She's in court-ordered therapy after getting a little too close to her previous subject. Filled with signature Spellman antics, this work is a hilarious and tender installment in the series.

Now in paperback, the fifth installment in the critically acclaimed, bestselling, Edgar Award-nominated series about a fearless private investigator Izzy Spellman and her quirky, yet endearing, family of sleuths.