What's a Girl Gotta Do?

Hayter, a journalist and stand-up comic, mines what she knows in this well-plotted mystery featuring an off-the-wall amateur sleuth. Robin Hudson, a ``third-string correspondent'' for TV's All News Network, saves news clippings on murder victims and grows poison ivy in the New York apartment she had shared with her husband, Burke Avery, until Amy Penny, an ANN magazine show co-host, swiped him. Robin observes Burke and Amy billing and cooing at the network's New Year's Eve party at a Manhattan hotel just before a stranger slips her a page from a PI report on herself and suggests she go to room 13D. No one answers at 13D and Robin suspects a prank until news breaks that a PI was bludgeoned to death in that room and that Robin was the last one seen in the area. She begins investigating on her own, while folks around ANN turn edgy: some shared an acquaintance with the PI that was more intimate than congenial. Someone breaks into Robin's apartment, leaving her to relish the one bright spot in her life--the sudden interest of good-looking producer Eric Slansky. Flat-out funny, audacious and a little weird, this debut stakes out territory all its own. For readers who respond to this brand of humor, Hayter's next book can't be published soon enough. 12,000 first printing. (Jan.)