A Bed of Scorpions

"What's an editor to do with so many demands? Do you deal with the morning's pile of manuscript submissions first? Or the swine from sales who steals all the chocolate digestives? Or do you concentrate on your ex-lover, whose business partner has just been found dead in their art gallery, slumped over his desk with a gun in his hand? It's another day at Timmins & Ross publishing house, but when sharp-tongued editor Samantha Clair's CID boyfriend is brought in to investigate Frank Compton's death, her loyalties become stretched. And when one of Aidan Merriam's artists is found dead in identical circumstances, Sam takes on the art world and the CID, armed with nothing more than her reliable weapons: satire, cynicism and a stock of irrelevant information culled from novels."@en
"Boxing Day. A dead body has been found in the chemistry department of Queen's University in West London. Tom Chambers, the head of department, was known to have a bad heart, and had it not been Christmas, no questions would have been asked. What was a procedural post mortem soon turns into a murder investigation when it becomes evident Chambers had been injected with a dangerous amount of digitalin. Publisher Samantha Clair is once more propelled into a crime investigation when her star author, Breda McManus' husband and physics professor, asks for her help."@en