Fashion Victim

A Dallas O'Connor Mystery

by Chloe Green

Kensington Publishing

Mystery

December 1, 2002

ISBN-13: 1575667150

Available in: Hardcover

Fashion Victim
by Chloe Green

As a top fashion stylist, Dallas O'Connor has a reputation for putting it all together - from haute couture runway shows to high-concept ad layouts. But she's never had an assignment like this one, a chance to create the "look" of a new, all-girl band shooting their first music video on a private Caribbean island in an exclusive, luxurious castle. Who cares that the band has already fired exactly forty-two stylists? Or that they're young enough to think Chanel is a music group? It's an offer the tall blond Texan has to think over for a whole nanosecond before boarding a plane for paradise.

Stepping onto the castle's lush grounds, Dallas is met by the proprietor; a local priestess named Mama Garcia, who skips the hellos to hiss, "Dat girl, she wear de face of Death." It's hardly a cheery welcome for the sometimes sleuth who has seen more than her share of untimely death. But when the scenery is velvety, the drinks are cold, and the money's good, who cares about bad juju warnings? Pulling together everything from pink baby-doll nighties to punk kilts and ermine-collared jackets, Dallas is determined to shake it all off and create the breakout look for the band... even if she has to put up with a power-mad Svengali producer, a sex-obsessed Russian makeup artist, and a foul-mouthed, knife-throwing pirate of a chef who makes her image a million new things to do with starfruit - none of which would take place in the kitchen.

What she's not ready for is the dead body that washes up on the beach, then disappears without a trace. The girls laugh it off to a bad hangover from too much rum punch. But no one's laughing when one of the girls is nearly poisoned to death - or when the others are threatened by voodoo dolls, pentagrams, poisonous snakes, and other black magic harbingers of doom. And when another body is found stabbed to death, Dallas' tropical paradise goes from slice of heaven to glittering morgue. As the sky turns dark and forbidding and an ominous storm approaches, the savvy sleuth has very little time to find a killer whose sense of style has taken a turn for the macabre before she ends up as a victim of more than just fashion...



Chloe Green's Bio

Chloe Green works in the fashion industry for everyone from Neiman-Marcus and JC Penney to Pier One and Dickie's. In her other life, she writes a popular time- travel series and teaches at Southern Methodist University.