The chic Manhattan nightspot called Du Vin has a French theme-though that it is owned by an Irishman who simply is actually married towards the NYPSD’s Lieutenant Eve Dallas. Du Vin isn’t the type of place Dallas would usually patronize, and it’s definitely not the kind of bar in which a lot of blood gets spilled. But that’s exactly what happens one cold February evening.

The mortally wounded woman who stumbles from the ladies’ area is Larinda Mars, a self-described “social information reporter” about Secrets in Death or, because so many people would call it, a specialist gossip. As it works out, she wasn’t publicly posting all the dirt she dug up. She held the very best, most surprising stories noiseless for profitable make use of in her part business as a blackmailer. Setting her places on rich, prominent marks, she’d uncover what they most wished to keep hidden and bleed them dried out. Now someone’s performed the same to her, literally-with a blade to the brachial artery.

Eve didn’t like Larinda Mars. But she wants murder even less. To discover justice for this victim, she’ll have to plunge into the filthy little secrets of all people Larinda Mars victimized. On the way, she could be subjected to some info she actually didn’t wish to know . .