Former wild child Izzy Spellman has finally agreed to take over the family business, and the transition won't be a smooth one.

Izzy Spellman, a twenty-eight-year-old amalgamation of Nancy Drew and Bridget Jones, launches her career as a private investigator while working for the firm of her outlandishly dysfunctional family. A first novel. Reprint.

Now in paperback, the fifth installment in the critically acclaimed, bestselling, Edgar Award-nominated series about a fearless private investigator Izzy Spellman and her quirky, yet endearing, family of sleuths.

Private investigator Isabel Spellman is back on the case and back on the couch. She's in court-ordered therapy after getting a little too close to her previous subject. Filled with signature Spellman antics, this work is a hilarious and tender installment in the series.

Izzy struggles to retain her private investigator's license after a pseudo engagement and her fourth arrest, a challenge that is further complicated by David's marriage to Petra, and by Rae's teenage angst.

?‘Fast-paced, irreverent, and very funny, The Spellman Files is like Harriet the Spy for grown-ups’ Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Eligible and American Wife At the ripe old age of thirty-two, former wild child Isabel "Izzy" Spellman has finally agreed to take over the family detective business. The transition won't be smooth. First among her priorities as head of Spellman Investigations is to dig up some dirt on the competition, slippery ex-cop Rick Harkey. Next, faced with a puzzling missing-person's case she recruits an actor friend, Len, to infiltrate the home of an ageing millionaire as an undercover butler.Meanwhile, Izzy is being blackmailed by her mother to commit to regular blind dates with promising professionals - an arrangement that doesn't thrill Connor, Izzy's soon to become Ex-boyfriend No. 12. At Spellman headquarters, it's business as unusual. Mom's been spotted crying in the pantry and just when it looks like things can't go more haywire.It just goes to show, however many Spellman Family Rules are put in place in an attempt to hold the family together, Izzy will never be able to follow Rule No. 1: Act Normal. ‘Hilarious. My enjoyment of The Spellman Files was only slightly undercut by my irritation that I hadn't written it myself. The funniest book I've read in years!’ Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada ‘The Spellman Files is hilarious, outrageous, and hip. Izzy Spellman, P.I., is a total original, with a voice so fresh and real, you want more, more, more. At long last, we know what Nancy Drew would have been like had she come from a family of lovable crackpots. Lisa Lutz has created a delicious comedy with skill and truth. I loved it’ Adriana Trigiani, author of Lucia, Lucia and Big Stone Gap

Dave, I just finished the first chapter of a new novel-a real crime novel with a dead body and all-and I thought of you... Paul and Lacey Hansen are pot-growing, twentysomething siblings sharing a modest rambler of a home in rural Northern California. When they find a headless corpse on their property they can't exactly call 911, so they simply move the body to another location. Let somebody else find it. Instead, the corpse reappears on their land. Clearly, someone is sending them a message, and it's getting riper by the day. But that's only half of the story... Enter authors Lisa Lutz and David Hayward-former real-life partners (professionally and personally) who have agreed to reunite for a tag- team mystery novel written in alternating chapters. One little problem: they disagree on pretty much every detail of how their novel should unfold. While the body count rises in Paul and Lacey's wildly unpredictable fictional world, so too does the intensity of Lisa and David's rivalry. The result is a literary brawl like no other, and a murder mystery every bit as unanticipated (and bloody).

Targeted by the members of her dysfunctional family for control over Spellman Investigations after staging a retaliatory takeover, Izzy is wrongly accused of embezzling funds from a wealthy Alzheimer's patient.

“A dead-serious thriller (with a funny bone)” (The New York Times Book Review), from the author of the New York Times bestselling Spellman Files series, comes the story of a woman who creates and sheds new identities as she crisscrosses the country to escape her past. Forty-eight hours after leaving her husband’s body at the base of the stairs, Tanya Dubois cashes in her credit cards, dyes her hair brown, demands a new name from a shadowy voice over the phone, and flees town. It’s not the first time. She meets Blue, a female bartender who recognizes the hunted look in a fugitive’s eyes and offers her a place to stay. With dwindling choices, Tanya-now-Amelia accepts. An uneasy―and dangerous―alliance is born. It’s almost impossible to live off the grid in the twenty-first century, but Amelia-now-Debra and Blue have the courage, the ingenuity, and the desperation, to try. Hopscotching from city to city, Debra especially is chased by a very dark secret. From heart-stopping escapes and devious deceptions, we are left to wonder…can she possibly outrun her past? The Passenger’s white-knuckled plot and unforeseeable twists make one thing for certain: the ride will leave you breathless. “When the answers finally come, they are juicy, complex, and unexpected. The satisfying conclusion will leave readers rethinking everything and immediately turning back to the first page to start again. Psychological suspense lovers will tear through this thriller” (Library Journal, starred review).