Juniper Song Mystery

Juniper Song knows secrets - how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend, Luke, asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective.

Working as an apprentice at a PI firm, Juniper Song finds herself nose deep in a Hollywood murder scandal where the lies may be more glamorous than most, but the truths they cover are just as ugly. When a young woman named Daphne Freamon calls looking for an eye on her boyfriend, her boss punts the client to Song. Daphne is an independently wealthy painter living in New York, and her boyfriend, Jamie Landon, is a freelance screenwriter in Los Angeles, ghostwriting a vanity project for aging movie star Joe Tilley. Song quickly learns that there's more to this case than a simple tail.

The daughter of Armenian immigrants, Rubina and her husband, Van, recently learned that she cannot get pregnant - so they hired Rubina's younger cousin, Lusig, to act as a surrogate. However, Lusig's best friend, Nora, has been missing for a month, and Rubina is concerned that her cousin is dealing with her stress in a way that could harm the baby. Rubina hires Song to shadow her and report all that she finds. Of course, Lusig is frantically searching for her friend, and Song's case soon turns into a hunt for the missing woman.