There's nothing like murder to cure a case of writer's block. Regency romance writer Juliet Bodine is falling into despair. Instead of writing, she spends her days staring at the pages of her unfinished novel, fantasizing about her inevitable failure. So the arrival of an eighty-four-year-old fan with a trove of yellowing papers to show is a welcome diversion instead of the nuisance it might have been. Demanding, outspoken, stylish, outrageous, and still dripping with sexual flair, Ada Caffrey is everything Juliet is not. But Juliet's bemused delight in her eccentric visitor changes to electric shock when she realizes Ada has stumbled upon a suppressed fragment of the blockbuster memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Regency England's wittiest, most notorious courtesan. One week later, Ada is dead and the manuscript is gone. Could a two-hundred-old sexual indiscretion be worth killing for? In Slightly Abridged, the second installment in Ellen Pall's Nine Muses mystery series, Juliet teams up with NYPD detective Murray Landis to find out.

Ellen Pall, a novelist whose prose has been praised as "precise, shrewd, and brightly amusing" ( Kirkus Reviews), with sentences that are "good enough to eat" ( The New Yorker), is the author of Back East and Among the Ginzburgs; she has also written many Regency romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. As a freelance journalist, she has written extensively on people in the arts for The New York Times and other publications. Slightly Abridged is the second in her Nine Muses Mysteries series. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and son.