Dead Madonna — Victoria Houston

The bucolic Wisconsin fishing-resort town of Loon Lake awakens one morning to a double homicide. Party girl DeeDee Kurlander is found dead beneath an affluent tourist's houseboat. Across town, a prominent widow lies savagely murdered in her elegant living room. And police chief Lew Ferris is shorthanded enough to deputize her own romantic interest, Paul Osborne, to assist as investigator and coroner.

Fishing being one of their shared passions, Lew accepts her new deputy's opinion that the victims were mutilated by an old muskie gaff--but that's the only apparent connection between the dead women. Soon, reports of looted bank accounts, slick entrepreneurs, wealthy Chicagoans and a hip "Party Cove" scene all add up to a deeper mystery and more spilled blood...before a twisted killer can be baited and caught.