Bubbles Yablonsky

Meet Bubbles Yablonsky, beautician-reporter-sleuth and blazing star of Strohmeyer’s entertaining, establishment-bashing debut as a mystery writer. Like the mills that gird the book’s seen-better-days steel town of Lehigh, Pa., the city is itself a seething cauldron.

Bubbles Yablonsky is in trouble. Her exposé of corruption in Lehigh’s social heights has infuriated the local paper’s editor, so she’s still a fulltime hairdresser and only an occasional reporter. Her freeloading ex is back on her sofa after his socialite wife threw him out, her daughter’s in love, and her mother thinks she’s Jackie Onassis. Plus, Bubbles’ chastity vow is not yet broken, which means sexy photographer Steve Stiletto’s heart has remained just out of reach....

When Bubbles' dream weekend with jet-setting photographer Steve Stiletto is interrupted by a series of circumstances that finds them careening down an abandoned mine shaft in a runaway coal car, it isn't long before she's discovered a dead body and found herself in the midst of a high-powered conspiracy.

After a catfight at a stuffy historical society meeting nearly kills her career, Bubbles is given just one week to prove her worth to her editors at the News-Times and earn a real job there by cracking her biggest story ever: uncovering who really murdered Carol Weaver’s steel-executive husband with cyanide-tipped fingernails.

Debuting as a full-time reporter, Bubbles lands an interview with a woman accused of murdering a beloved high school principal. When the suspect keels over dead—in mid-revelation—Bubbles’s confidential notes become a life-threatening hot commodity among a romance-obsessed detective, a Polish Mafioso, and a foot fetishist on the lam.

For years the local ladies of Lehigh, Pennsylvania, have wished aloud that Debbie Shatsky would meet an untimely end—so they could get their hands on Phil Shatsky, sports-hating, dinner-cooking, massage-giving husband extraordinaire. But when Debbie gets hair extensions at the House of Beauty and dies from a reaction to the glue, it’s salon owner Sandy who gets the blame.