Kinsey Millhone, a private detecting from Santa Teresa, California, is back on a case. This one leaves her out of her element as she is forced into the night life. She has been hired by the mother of Lorna Kepler, a young woman who was found dead 10 months earlier in her rented cabin. Poor Lindsey had been dead long enough that her body had started to decompose, leaving open the question as to how she died, and particularly whether she was murdered.

Lorna loved the nightlife and most of the people in her life either work third shift or just plain like to party. This leaves Kinsey out and about at all night every night and feeling quite sleep deprived.

To make things more interesting, Lorna's mother received a videocassette in the male, and it was a porn video that was never released, but starred Lorna. It does not take long for Kinsey to realize that this is just an example of a secret life her young victim was able to keep from her family.

This case, bizarrely leads Kinsey through a series of people to talk to, but these interviews result in little helpful information. There is the couple who rent Lorna her cabin. There is Lorna's deejay friend at the local station. Then, she gets a chance to talk to the guy who made the porn movie. Kinsey also meets and befriends a young prostitute who was close to Lorna and provides no shortage of insight into some of the shadowy people that Lorna knew. Then, there is the surprising involvement of a diminutive, local developer with no shortage of people mad at him. Of course, there is also her father and older sisters.

The irony is that Kinsey ends up finding that most of the people she ends up talking to might be suspects, but none of the information she is finding is conclusive enough to narrow her roster. It is one last final detail that provides the insight as to who did the deed. Unfortunately, Kinsey finds herself in a situation in which she must choose the wrong option to make things right. A question that will have to be answered in later books in the series is whether or not she can live with herself after the decision.

This was a good book. I had been having a little bit of trouble with connecting with the last couple of books in the series, but this one was up to snuff. I tend to like "cozies," a form of mystery in which there is a defined group of suspects all drawn together by the victim's life or the setting, and this one is a good one.