Deadly Pursuit — Marcia Miller

The nightmare began on the night of Amanda Hill's party in honor of Griff Baxter, a well-known writer. But neither Blair Conover nor her friend Susie Vincent was aware of the shadow of danger hovering over them. For poor Susie, that signal of danger foreshadowed her death, and for Blair it plunged her into a series of incidents that showed plainly that someone was in deadly pursuit of her.

What had occurred at Amanda's party that could have triggered such a nightmare? Blair and Susie both worked at the same television studio in Burbank, and while Amanda's kitchen arranging hors d' oeurves, Susie outlined for Blair the plot of a story she was writing. Her excitement was genuine as she elaborated her ideas to Blair, and both Blair and Mal Lewis, the program director at the studio, were convinced that Susie was on her way to seeing her work published. But only a few short days later, Susie called Blair to say that she was scrapping her story idea; her reason was that she was sure she had heard the plot before and therefore she might be guilty of plagiarism. And then she died.

Blair's anguish over Susie was not diminished by the attentions of Griff Baxter, nor by her budding friendship with Mal Lewis, both of whom seemed eager to convince her that in some way Susie had given her a clue to why she had been killed...