Well Read and Dead

February 23, 2009
The perils of Pauline Cook, society widow extraordinaire, include some decidedly dark twists in O'Connell's otherwise lighthearted second mystery (after 2007's Well Bred and Dead
). After a long, decadent European vacation, Pauline returns to a post-9/11 America to learn she's lost nearly $20 million in bad investments. Adding insult to injury, Air France loses her Louis Vuitton luggage, plus her best friend, Whitney Armstrong, who's been taking care of her precious cat, Fleur, has vanished, along with Fleur and Whitney's dogs. Whitney's grief-stricken husband, scion of the nation's largest lingerie empire, offers Pauline a multimillion-dollar reward to find Whitney. Pauline decides she could use the money to pay for unfinished renovations on her Chicago penthouse. Brimming with witty observations about the well-heeled and the machinations of greedy businessmen, this sophisticated romp takes the daring amateur sleuth all the way to Thailand and Vietnam.

March 1, 2009
A Chicago socialite tries to recover from financial losses by finding an industrialist's missing wife.

Poor Pauline! After sailing the Adriatic in the arms of a splendidly muscled captain who turns out to have a splendidly pregnant wife ashore, ultra-wealthy Henry Cook's widow (Well Bred and Dead, 2007) comes home to find her fortune lost to Enron and her Vuitton luggage sent to Tahiti by Air France. Renovations to her penthouse, under the direction of impudent (but sexy and surprisingly literate) contractor Tag McKay, have stalled. So she checks into the Drake, stopping on the way to retrieve her cat Fleur, who's been parked for the duration with her best friend Whitney Armstrong. Alas, Fleur is gone, along with Whitney, who disappeared shortly after joining a women's book group. Whitney's teary-eyed husband Jack, owner of Verry Lingerie—whose panties sell for more than you earn in a week—offers Pauline $5 million to find his vanished bride. After a brief trip to Aspen and an abortive attempt to marry into Dexter Worthington Senior's considerable fortune, Pauline settles down to sleuth her way out of poverty. Getting in touch with her inner cougar, she teams up with Marcel, a 30-something computer geek whose office is the local Starbucks. Soon she's traced her quarry to Bangkok and is off to Indochina to collect her bounty.

The battle between overbearing, superficial Pauline and her nascent social conscience is almost interesting until it's trashed by a climax out of deep left field.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2009
Socialite Pauline Cook returns to Chicago to find that her best friend has disappeared, the Enron scandal has wiped out her personal fortune, and work on her apartment renovation has halted. Poor, homeless Pauline, with only $2 million to sustain her, takes up the challenge of finding her friend, which leads to Thailand and unexpected danger. O'Connell portrays the lives of the phenomenally wealthy with humor and a fondness for Pauline, who in a rare moment or two rises above her social status to attain a momentary flash of the heroic. For larger collections.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2009
This is the second adventure for Chicagos Golden Mile socialite widow Pauline Cook (following 2007s Well Bred and Dead). Initially, it seems difficult to have much sympathy for a slightly ditzy, superficial multimillionaire who seems to regularly float into irresponsible relationships and lose 20 million dollars or so through her own carelessness. But Pauline does have a strong sense of loyalty and asurprising amount ofcommon sense. While she is not at all computer or technically savvy, she doesnt hesitate to try to solve the disappearance of her friend Whitney Armstrong. (Of course, the promise of a multimillion-dollar reward by Whitneys husband helps to strengthen her resolve.) Thanks to her jet-set connections and uncontrollable spending habits (she spent her way through her first fortune and lost her second with the help of Enron), Pauline knows how to globe-trot and easily travels from Chicago to Aspen to Southeast Asia in search of Whitney. Readers will find themselves warming to this improbable high-society sleuth who challenges our assumptions about what a mystery heroine should be like.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)