Where there's Lucie Smoker there's fire-literally-and murder with a brush stroke of romance.

I had an opportunity to beta read a bit of this, and was looking forward to its release so I could find out what happened in the complex life of artist, Adele Proust.

After a few years of non-dating, due to Adele's dysfunctional relationship with her ex-husband, she ventures back into the dating scene. Not only is her ex showing renewed interest but also a drug dealer, a musician--and her over protective friend Marvin is leery of all of them. Problem is one of them, even Marv, could be a murderer. Enter a new man in the mix, who happens to be an FBI agent who wants her to spy on all of her friends, and matters get quite complex. When her friends start to turn up dead, she feels she has no choice but to agree and use her artistic connections in her tight nit art & music community to find the killer.

I totally enjoyed this book and wavered back and forth as I tried to figure out who the killer was. The one star taken off had nothing to do with Lucie's writing, but the publisher's formatting. I was confused in a couple spots like when a newspaper article was mentioned (around pg 87, Midfield Secretary Found Tortured), so it took a reread to get where the news article ended and the story text came back. A font change or a right and left indent (if that's possible for kindle format) would have helped to define the difference. That was my only nit pick.

I think the author captured well the art and music scene, and the variety of lifestyles of the characters of Montrose, and despite their many differences, their die-hard effort to keep developers out and their community intact. ( )