Well-Heeled — Roz Siegel

When Emily's elderly customer, Sophia Sarfatti, complains her shoe is uncomfortable--and Emily pries off the heel to investigate --she discovers a stash of precious stones that has the power not only to make her own life uncomfortable--but to end it completely. Someone is using Emily's Place, the fashionista's favorite discount shoe store on New York City's colorful Upper West Side, to traffic in stolen stones, and the list of possible suspects keeps growing. Was it Freddie the Fox, a local kid who sold her a few pair at a really good price because "they happened to have fallen off a truck?" Or was it Italian Mafia--the shoes were imported from Italy--or worse yet, was it the Russian Mafia, expanding their neighborhood fur business? Or could it be some independent entrepreneur? Even Beverly Bernstein, the kindergarten teacher has a yen for treasure like that. Then the annual fund-raising event to help the local public school and other community organizations goes terribly wrong and nobody in the neighborhood will tell Emily's friend Murphy the Cop the truth about anything, because everyone, from SuperMama who takes cre of the brownstone around the corner, to her store manager's dapper boyfriend, Alec le Grand, whose gambling debts have been mounting, to the elderly Italian, known as the "Senator," who visits the sick, have something to hide. But Emily knows that whoever has stashed those stones is going to come back for them, and she begins to worry--big time--not only about herself but about her other customers, whose heels, stuffed with diamonds and rubies, even now might be taking them on a short-cut to the cemetery.