Red Blooded Murder

Red Blooded Murder
Laura Caldwell

For the first time in my adult life I was flying without a net.Fear was nibbling at my insides, creeping its way into my brain. I was buzzing with apprehension. But the job offer from Jane was a bolt of calm, clean sunshine breaking through the murky depths of my nerves. Chicago is the Windy City, and these days the winds of change are whipping Izzy McNeil’s life all over the map.A high-profile job on Trial TV lands her in the hot seat. After a shocking end to her engagement, she finds herself juggling not only her ex-fiancé, but a guy she never expected. And a moonlighting undercover gig has her digging deep into worlds she barely knew existed. But all of this takes a backseat when Izzy’s friend winds up brutally murdered.Suddenly, Izzy must balance the demands of a voracious media and the knowledge that she didn’t know her friend as well as she thought. When red-blooded lust leads to cold-blooded murder, corpus delicti takes on a whole new meaning

Praise for the novels of Laura Caldwell

Red Hot Lies

“Chicago is brilliantly illuminated in Red Hot Lies, a book bursting with scandals and secrets.” —David Ellis, Edgar Award-winning author of Line of Vision and Eye of the Beholder

“A legal lioness—Caldwell has written a gripping,

edge-of-the-seat thriller that will not disappoint.”

—Steve Martini, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow of Power and Compelling Evidence

The Good Liar

“The Good Liar strikes like an assassin’s bullet: sudden, swift, precise, deadly. Not to be missed.” —New York Times bestselling author James Rollins

“Laura Caldwell’s The Good Liar is a massive achievement in one novel, launching a woman right up there with the top thriller writers around.” —International bestselling author Ken Bruen

The Rome Affair

“A fabulous, hypnotic psychological thriller …

Laura Caldwell is a force we can’t ignore.”

—New York Times bestselling author Stella Cameron

“This is [Caldwell’s] most exciting book yet …

a summer must-read.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

Look Closely

“A haunting story of suspense and family secrets …

you won’t want to put it down.”

—New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark

The Night I Got Lucky

“Caldwell is one of the most talented and inventive

chick-lit writers around, and her latest features a

likable heroine in an unusual situation and ends

with a clever resolution.”

—Booklist

The Year of Living Famously

“Snazzy, gripping … an exciting taste of

life in the fast lane.”

—Booklist

A Clean Slate

“A page-turner about a woman with a chance

to reinvent herself, something most of us have

imagined from time to time.”

—Chicago Tribune

Burning the Map

“Exotic locales (Rome and Greece), strong

portrayal of the bonds between girlfriends, cast

of sexy foreign guys and, most of all, its touching

story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.”

—Barnes & Noble.com, selected as one of “The Best of 2002”

Also by Laura Caldwell RED HOT LIES THE GOOD LIAR THE ROME AFFAIR LOOK CLOSELY THE NIGHT I GOT LUCKY THE YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY A CLEAN SLATE

Dear Reader,

The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world), and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books—Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly all the places I’ve written about are as true-blue Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasionally I’ve taken licence with a few locales, but I hope you’ll enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’ll visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—it’s a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable.

The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at info@lauracaldwell.com to let me know what you think about the books, especially what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading.

Laura Caldwell

Red Blooded Murder

Laura Caldwell