Free Love

The time is 1920. The place is Greenwich Village, where food and wine are cheap, talk and ideas are rich, and love is free. This heady atmosphere has drawn actors, artists, and writers from all over who call the winding streets of the Village home. And it is here, amid the hot jazz and cool gin, that a free-spirited young poet finds her perfect milieu-and deadly danger... FREE LOVE Olivia Brown feels she has nothing left. Tragically, she has lost her fianc in the Great War and her beloved guardian in the flu epidemic. Yet much to her surprise, her attorney informs her that she does, indeed, have something: an inherited brownstone on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Her building is uninhabited except for one tenant, the strange, nocturnal man who has a lifelong lease on the ground-floor flat. He is, of all things, a private detective. In no time at all, Olivia is working cases with him, selling her sonnets to Vanity Fair, breaking hearts, and flaunting Prohibition at a speakeasy called Chumley's. Then one evening after too many martinis, she literally trips over the body of a woman. Not only is the woman dead, but her face is shockingly familiar, for she bears an uncanny resemblance to Olivia Brown herself Thus begins a mystery that pits the girl from Bedford Street against a keen-witted killer. Her only hope is to somehow smoke out the murderer before everyone in the Village is lamenting the fate of the poet Olivia Brown-the one with so much promise, the one who died so young... Praise for FREE LOVE "I guarantee you will fall in love with poet-cum-private eye Olivia Brown. With a quirky taste for good booze, bad men, and women's suffrage-and moving through the textured, fully realized world of gangsters, speakeasies, and flappers that Ms. Meyers brilliantly evokes-Olivia Brown is a wonderful original -ROBERT CRAIS, AUTHOR OF LA. REQUIEM "The 1920s? A competent and independent young woman who investigates crimes? What is the world coming to? Olivia Brown throws a whole new light on what our grandparents got up to...or perhaps it was only in Greenwich Village." -LAURIE KING, AUTHOR OF 0 JERUSALEM "Annette Meyers writes of love and murder in old New York better than anybody. Read FREE LOVE " -LISA SCOTTOLIINE, AUTHOR OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY "A tempestuous heroine, Prohibition, dry martinis, love, sex, and murder. Who could ask for anything more? " -JANET EVANOVICH, AUTHOR OF HIGH FIVE