The irrepressible heroine of Sarah Strohmeyer's Agatha Award-winning series makes her usual headline-grabbing entrance just in time to heat up Pennsylvania's coal country-in another rip-roaring tale of murder and mayhem. Bubbles Ablazefinds the redoubtable Ms. Bubbles Yablonsky heeding a call from her boss at the News-Timesand racing her Camaro toward a potentially big news story. But when she arrives at an abandoned coal mine, she finds the love of her life, Steve Stiletto, knocked unconscious . . . and the body of another man with a sizeable hole in his chest. Moments later, Bubbles and Stiletto are trapped by an explosion. Convinced that someone wants them dead, they search for their intended assassin in coal country, where they uncover a conspiracy at the Main Mane hairdressing salon, a cadre of women known as the Sirens of Slagville, and a hot spot called Limbo that's been burning underground for forty years. With a cast of characters headed by the usual suspects-Bubbles's brainy teenage daughter Jane; Jane's clueless boyfriend G; and that dynamite duo, her mother LuLu and paranoid sidekick Genevieve- and led by the singular Bubbles herself, this is another fast and furious tale that will keep readers in Limbo-and in stitches.

Sarah Strohmeyer is the author of Bubbles Unbound and Bubbles in Trouble, the first two mysteries in her award-winning series. She is also a former journalist whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and on Salon.com.

Chapter One Looking back, I guess my first mistake was to assume that a rookie reporter could pursue both a hot story and a hot sex life. I mean, what was I thinking? One glance at a crusty old city editor and the truth is obvious: the only time sex coexists with journalism is in a newspaper's police log. And even then, it's usually followed by the word "crime." My experience, unfortunately, was no exception. The evening began with me between red satin sheets in the Passion Peak Resort -- one of those fancy and romantic Pocono Mountain lovers hotels that I'd dreamt of staying in since I was a little girl. Hunky Associated Press photographer Steve Stiletto was late, per usual. As an international photojournalist more accustomed to dodging bullets than punching clocks, punctuality is optional in his world. Even when the option was making love to a thirty-something, living Polish-Lithuanian Barbie named Bubbles who hadn't had sex in five months, twenty days and four hours. And, yes, I was counting. This time he had an acceptable excuse. The President was hitting the hustings for Pennsylvania Republicans, and Stiletto was to shoot him at every stop. As soon as Air Force One left for Washington, Stiletto vowed to develop his film, send it off to the AP office in New York and meet me at the Passion Peak for our first night of sexual intimacy. In the meantime, I made sure everything was perfect. I had arranged and rearranged the cinnamon-scented candles around the champagne-glass style Jacuzzi and practiced seductively unrolling my stockings from their black lace garters until one got a run when it snagged on my acrylic nail. Finally, after lying on the circular bed and staring at my reflection in the overhead mirror for so long that I started seriously considering liposuction, I dialed the front desk. "Has a Steve Stiletto left a message for me by any chance?" "No Stiletto," said the clerk. "Salvo." "Mr. Salvo?" Uh-oh. Mr. Salvo was my boss at the Lehigh News-Times. "And you didn't put him through to my room?" "In case you're unawares, this is a honeymoon hotel. We got an automatic do-not-disturb policy. I told him to fax over the message and I'd get it to you ASAP." "Bet he took that well." "Let's just say I never knew ASAP referred to unmentionable body parts." There was the rustling of paper. "I got it right here. On company letterhead, no less." A fax on News-Timesstationery meant trouble and I was right. The one-page letter contained an urgent message, along with detailed directions to an abandoned coal mine called simply Number Nine in the nearby town of Slagville, where a Lehigh businessman had reportedly been found fatally shot in the chest earlier in the evening. It promised to be a media circus. Because I was in the area, Mr. Salvo concluded, I could beat the pack of other Lehigh Valley reporters and get an exclusive for tomorrow's paper -- that is, if I hustled. A police press conference was tentatively scheduled for 11:30 p.m. -- one half hour before the final edition deadline. The stamp on the fax said 9:15. The time on the heart-shaped bedside clock said 11. Mr. Salvo was going to have my bleached blond head on a plate. I shoved my gartered gams into a pair of black spandex pants, wiggled into an apricot-colored turtleneck and scribbled a note for Stiletto that I intended to sound sexy, but which came off instead as a desperate plea for him to stay awake until I returned. I dropped it off with the front desk clerk and hopped in the Camaro. The murder scene would be crawling with reporters by now, I thought, as I goosed it down Route 15. Like most Pennsylvania highways it was as smooth as a brick patio. Bumpity bump