What's a Girl Gotta Do? (Robin Hudson Mysteries) - Hardcover

Hayter, a journalist and stand-up comic, mines what she knows in this well-plotted mystery featuring an off-the-wall amateur sleuth. Robin Hudson, a "third-string correspondent" for TV's All News Network, saves news clippings on murder victims and grows poison ivy in the New York apartment she had shared with her husband, Burke Avery, until Amy Penny, an ANN magazine show co-host, swiped him. Robin observes Burke and Amy billing and cooing at the network's New Year's Eve party at a Manhattan hotel just before a stranger slips her a page from a PI report on herself and suggests she go to room 13D. No one answers at 13D and Robin suspects a prank until news breaks that a PI was bludgeoned to death in that room and that Robin was the last one seen in the area. She begins investigating on her own, while folks around ANN turn edgy: some shared an acquaintance with the PI that was more intimate than congenial. Someone breaks into Robin's apartment, leaving her to relish the one bright spot in her life--the sudden interest of good-looking producer Eric Slansky. Flat-out funny, audacious and a little weird, this debut stakes out territory all its own. For readers who respond to this brand of humor, Hayter's next book can't be published soon enough. 12,000 first printing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As if third-string reporter Robin Hudson, of New York's All News Network, didn't have enough problems already--her estranged husband's taken up with an on-air twinkie, her sex life is a distant memory, she's seen en route to a staff masquerade party waving a tire iron at her abusive old downstairs neighbor--and now the mysterious caller who insisted she meet him at the party stands her up because he's been killed by a blunt instrument, like maybe a tire iron. Though the police don't take Robin seriously as a suspect, all the ANN higher-ups who aren't busy hitting on her are ready to give her up to protect super-reporter Joanne Armoire when it turns out that the dead guy, a shamus with a file on anybody who's worked with ANN's premier anchor Greg Browner, was interested in Armoire--and in Browner's former producer Susan Brave too. What's the connection, and does it have to involve Robin's perilously young new romantic prospect, Browner producer Eric Slansky? The dialogue reads like a string of Percodan lunches, but Robin's seen-it-all naivet‚ makes this an appealing debut. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.