Thrill City

Part-time stripper, part-time PI Simone Kirsch of Melbourne, Australia, makes her third appearance (after 2005’s Rubdown) in Redhead’s rollicking, if overlong, mélange of murder, romantic entanglements, and vengeance. Crime fiction writer Nick Austin hires Claire for a ride-along so he can see how a female PI works. That plan goes bad, however, with her discovery of Nick dead drunk on his living room floor and the corpse of his ex-wife, Isabella Bishop, in the bedroom. Soon, the now-fugitive writer’s actions implicate Claire, and her only way to clear herself is to track him down and solve a mystery that may have originated with a fateful authors’ tour that included Nick, Isabella, and bestseller Rod Thurlow. The police, meanwhile, aren’t the only ones warning off Claire; someone else is willing to use violence to stop her. Irrepressible Chloe Wozniak, who runs Chloe’s Elite Strippers, provides some wonderfully comic moments as Claire’s self-appointed sidekick. (Feb.)