The Lipstick Room

Chicago, 1930s: when nightclub singer Veronica Lakewood returns to her hotel after midnight to find Detective O'Rourke waiting with the news that a young typist named Alice Mercer has been found strangled in her locked room — the words VERA LANE WILL UNDERSTAND written on the dead girl's mirror in lipstick, and a card already waiting at the club reading YOU SING LIKE THE DOOR IS LOCKED. IT ISN'T — it becomes clear that a killer has been practising on women alone in the city for months, entering rooms, moving objects, leaving knives on pillows, before graduating to murder and choosing Veronica's name as his return address; a duplicate key to her hotel suite found in the dead girl's room, a woman's red scarf tied to her fire escape in the rain, a second terrified survivor reached by telephone before the line goes dead, and the notebook Alice Mercer hid before she was killed — slipped under the door of room 614 with the words PART ONE written beneath her name — make plain that this is not finished but only beginning; The Lipstick Room is an original noir mystery about women who were not listened to until it was too late, and the singer who intends to be the last door he opens.