"Max Starr is back, but this time without the ghost to help her solve the mystery."

Max Starr returns, the unwilling psychic witness to the final moments of a faithless husband with a masked woman. After her birthday party, attended by hot cop Witt Quentin and his eccentric mother Ladybird, Max and Witt return to her apartment for a more intimate celebration (Witt gives her a toy Dodge Ram, a miniature version of his own truck about which Max has wild fantasies) where they have wild sex. She reveals to him the dream she had about the man, and how this time she didn't see his death. They listen to the news and learns that a man named Lance LaRusso was murdered in a high rise, and that the police are searching for a woman in a feathered Mardi Gras mask who was seen leaving the scene. Just as in her dream. Max has to solve it, but this time she doesn't have the ghost whispering in her ear as she always has had before. With the help of the ghost of Cameron, her late husband, she attempts to see more, but is only able to see the meeting of LaRussa with his call girl lover.

Max enlists the aide of LadyBird to stake out the hotel bar and recognizes the woman from her visions as a high-priced escort named Angela Rocket. Witt provides her a bit more information, that LaRUssa was killed on his wife's desk in her downtown office. Trouble is, his wife has an unbreakable alibi, an alibi tied to Bud Traynor, a man who has appeared in all of Max's cases. A man she loathes because she recognizes him as evil under his civilized veneer as rich, socially prominent attorney. She can't prove it, but he is behind all the murders she's solved, an elegant spider spinning dark webs where the least twitch of a strand can prod someone into doing his dirty work for him.

Witt is not amused by Max's proposed plan to pose as someone who wants to get into the escort business, the way she's gotten temp jobs at other places connected to victims in the past. He orders her not to do it, which pushes Max's "I hate being controlled" button, and they have a knockdown dragout fight. If that isn't bad enough, Cameron confronts her with her own desire for Witt — and she ends up having sex with Cam, who impersonates Witt for her, forcing her to face her own desperate need for Witt.

Max has more than enough suspects to juggle. There's the sweet, lovely widow and her slightly eccentric father. Then Angela Rocket, the gorgeous escort, is also another possibility. And could Bud Traynor actually be the one who pulled the strings here? He makes it plain to Max that he wants her on her knees before him, cowed and his plaything, something Max vows will never happen. All the time she's trying to solve a nasty murder, Max is also dealing with her own troubled past: her husband's murder and the beating and rape she survived, abuse in her childhood. Cam is forcing her to look at her own desperate need for control and her fear of intimacy, issues she sees mirrored in her suspects. All of her own problems seem to be tied to the cases she solves, along with the number 452.

Can Max actually find the killer before the killer finds her? Will Bud finally find something to hold over her? Will she have the courage to face her own demons and accept the real and honest love Witt offers her, or will she settle for empty sex with strangers and the ghost of her late husband? How happy was her marriage, really?

This is another tightly plotted mystery with so many twists you get dizzy. There are enough plausible suspects to choose from and many, many secrets to strip away — almost as many as Max herself possesses — before the terrifying climax. Max is developing as a character in each book. She began as "a wet mess" -- a woman who has everything she needs to be happy but who deliberately turns her back on it out of fear. She's been taking steps in each book to overcome that fear, but it's two steps forward once step back with the supportive and sexy Witt. Watching her battle her issues is painful and fascinating, and if she weren't such a likable smartmouth, it would be too uncomfortable to bear. But Max never feels sorry for herself, which wins over the reader. Witt is hot, sexy, honest as the day is long, and rapidly reaching the end of his rope with the games Max can't help playing. You keep your fingers crossed for them both. Cam remains an interesting puzzle as Max's ghostly husband who seems to be back for a reason other than just keeping Max warm in bed at night. And Bud Traynor, handsome, well-dressed, well-spoken, much-admired in the community, is perhaps the most loathsome monster I've run across since Hannibal Lector.

If you like your sex scorching, your characters so real they bleed on the page, and your plots knotty, this book's for you. If you have't read the first three books in the series, buy 'em now and get ready for a roller caster ride. Skully just keeps getting better and better, and so do Max and WItt

Sensuality Rating: Hot sex with a ghost and a human lover— and Max pretending to be a hooker using her lover as her john and preforming oral sex in the back of a car (in order to gain the trust of a suspect, not for fun).

Reviewed by Gillian Fitzgerald
Courtesy Sensual Romance Reviews
Posted January 4, 2005