Blue. It's an odd nickname left over from childhood and not exactly appropriate for a social psychologist. Then again, nothing about Blue McCarron is conventional. Not the isolation she thinks she enjoys in a half-built California desert motel. Not the torch she carries for Misha, a feminist with a mysterious past who, it has been said, could seduce furniture on a good day. Not even the way she got involved in the bizarre Muffin Crandall case. Like everyone in the area, Blue knew all about the sixty-one-year-old widow who had confessed to smacking a man on the head with a paperweight and then storing his body in a public freezer for five years. But she didn't know that Muffin had a brother thirty years her junoir. Now Dan wants Blue to free his sister by analyzing her. Galvanized by an interesting case and a hefty fee, Blue signs on. To her surprise, she likes Muffin, and doesn't believe her story for a minute. A woman who raised a kid brother, held down two jobs to do it, and became an activist in her retirement is no killer. Why would anyone want to harm such an admirable woman? Who is the stiff in the icebox? What is Muffin trying to cover up? And how did the deadly paperweight find its way into the rose-and-chintz den of one of her genteel cronies?