The Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Volume One : The Snake Tattoo, Coyote, and Steel Guitar

As a former Boston cop, Carlotta Carlyle thought she had seen it all—but that was before she became a private eye... In The Snake Tattoo, a London Times outstanding book of the year, Carlotta Carlyle's former boss, Lieutenant Mooney, gets into a scrap with a stranger in a bar. When the stranger winds up comatose, Mooney is suspended, and he needs Carlotta to find the one woman who can exonerate him: a blond hooker with a snake tattoo. But when Carlotta picks up a second case—tracking down a prep school kid's missing girlfriend—she's drawn into two different yet deadly worlds. Boston private investigators aren't supposed to touch murder cases. But in Coyote, an illegal immigrant named Manuela Estefan has nowhere else to turn. She was mistakenly pronounced dead when her ID card was found on the body of a murdered woman near Fenway Park, and now she needs Carlotta to get her ID—and her life—back. But this wasn't an isolated crime. A vicious killer is targeting Boston's immigrant community... and could easily add Carlotta to the kill list. In Steel Guitar, Carlotta, now a part-time taxi driver, is shocked to see blues superstar Dee Willis climb into her cab. They were friends in college—until Dee ran off with Carlotta's husband. Now, Dee's in town playing a concert and wants Carlotta's help tracking down a mutual friend. But when a blackmail plot is uncovered and a corpse is found in Dee's hotel room, Carlotta will have to work fast to keep Dee from becoming another casualty of the blues.