Putting Lipstick on a Pig: A Rep & Melissa Pennyworth Mystery

Michael Bowen

May 2011 · Poisoned Pen Press Inc

About this ebook

Vance Hayes died while joyriding on a snowmobile late one night and breaking through thin ice near the Wisconsin Dells. The cold-hearted, hard-headed lawyer goes unmourned by clients, colleagues, or anyone else—including his reluctant eulogist, fellow attorney Rep Pennyworth. In fact, interest in Hayes’ death is merely perfunctory until it inter-sects with the perils facing charmingly ingenuous Vietnamese-American court reporter Sue Key, tied to Milwaukee’s Hmong community. Could it be that Hayes died not because of any of the rotten and vicious things he spent his career doing to literally hundreds of people, but because of the one decent, human endeavor that marked his adult life? The situation is further complicated by deer season when for several weeks in the fall, “up north” is home to 700,000 people carrying loaded firearms. And by the presence of a gaggle of lawyers, patrician and plebian, grouped around Indianapolis and Milwau-kee, not to mention a private eye, an e-tailer into books, and a seedy photographer. Can Rep and his shrewd wife Melissa find in them the key to solving the puzzle of Vance Hayes’ death?

About the author

Mike Bowen, a trial lawyer practicing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the author of numerous mystery novels, including Screenscam (2002), which introduced Rep and Melissa Pennyworth. Bowen has been a member and moderator of panels at several Bouchercons and has made presentations at numerous other mystery-related events. He wrote the entry on The American Legal System for the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, and was a member of the panels that selected the winner of the 1995 Edgar Award for Best Mystery and the 1996 Edgar Award for Best Critical or Biographical Work. Bowen graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1976. While at Harvard, he served on the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review, and was a member of the winning team and was named the best oralist in the Ames Competition (moot court). Bowen lives with his wife, Sara Armbruster Bowen and their younger children, John, Marguerite and James, in Fox Point, a suburb of Milwaukee.