Revenge of the Cootie Girls: A Robin Hudson Mystery (Viking Mystery Suspense) - Tapa dura

Now that she's executive producer of Special Reports, Robin Hudson is feeling (relatively) settled. She is fairly content to be a sympathetic ear to her insane girlfriends and to be in a steady non-relationship with several sometime boyfriends (it's not too hard when none of them lives in New York all the time - and when your fear of commitment is slightly greater than your desire for emotional security). Okay, she's bored. In an effort to feel useful, she has taken under her wing a new intern, wide-eyed small-town girl Kathy Loblaws, and invited her along on a Girls' Night Out - a semiregular frenzy of female bonding meant to alleviate Robin's goilfriends' love crises and her own ennui. It's Halloween, and Kathy doesn't show - but telephones from a strange man's closet. Aided by her pals, Tamayo (now a full-time comic), Claire (ever the rising star), and Sally the bald witch, who has a Princeton degree and monitors everyone's karma, Robin must track down her errant charge through one long night of murder and mayhem, costumes and concealed weapons, men who are not what they seem (are they ever?), and unsettling deja vu. For Robin slowly comes to realize that the search for her missing intern is really a deadly trip into the past, fueled by an old curse.