Janice Croom
Book One: Death of an Idiot Boss
A Kadence MacBride Mystery
Corporate climber, Kadence MacBride, is smashing through the glass ceiling with her size ten pumps, or so she thinks. Not only is she passed over for her idiot employee, he's her new boss.
Worst day ever, or so she thinks. Worst doesn't have a floor, and idiots tend to get themselves killed.
Losing a promotion—bad
Becoming a murder suspect—way worse
Police Captain Cooper has hit his own glass ceiling. Solving this case quickly will break him through it, so Cooper doesn't care what's true. Since Kadence makes the easiest target, he's gunning for her.
There are some things you don't delegate. Adding amateur sleuth to her resume, Kadence sets out to find the real killer. Failing that, she'll trade her red power suit for an orange jump suit.
Excerpt
Friday, June 22, 2001
There are some days I’d love to bottle up and save: the day I graduated summa cum laude, the days I married and divorced my ex, and if everything worked out, today.
My orange juice was perfect: fresh squeezed with a twist of lime. A basket of warm sweet-potato muffins from Momma Pearl's scented the air with home-made goodness. A bouquet of yellow roses lay on the seat beside me. Despite asking him not to, my boyfriend Terrence had thought of everything down to the new red silk power suit I sported.
“Ante victoriam ne canan triumphum: don’t sing triumphs before the victory,” I’d said.
Terrence didn’t share my fondness for Latin. “Victory is yours,” he’d countered, and so he’d sent all this stuff plus a limo to ferry me to work.
“All set, Ms. MacBride?” the driver asked.
“Carry on, Jeeves.” His name tag said Jerome. That’s no name for a limo driver. Course, some folks might say Kadence MacBride was no name for a thirty-something African-American woman.
Stretch limos didn’t grace my neighborhood that often, especially not on a Friday morning. More than a few curtains rustled as we passed.
There’d be more than curtains rustling if I showed up to work in this thing.
“So, Jeeves, I need you to let me out about two blocks from my building. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
Jeeves shook his head. “I’m to deliver you to the front door. Mr. Chandler’s instructions were very specific.”
“Mr. Chandler will never know. You do want me to give him a good report, don’t you?”
Raising two fingers to his chauffeur’s cap, Jeeves saluted. “As you wish.”
I leaned back and sipped my juice. Luther Vandross crooned, “So Amazing,” over speakers that made it sound like he was in the limo with me.
No matter what happened today, next Saturday morning I'd be on the first Caribbean-bound flight to meet Terrence for five whole weeks, the most vacation I’d ever taken at one time. As much vacation as I had banked I could have taken off five months. No phone. No television. The brush of tropical breezes against our skin. The sound of waves crashing on the shore. The smell of—what was that smell? I knocked on the partition separating us.
Jeeves slid it open. “Don’t panic.”