Rose Malone’s landlord and employer, Ozzie Oswald, just died, and now she has no idea if she has a job or if she and her daughter, Poppy, have a place to live, and that’s on top of the arrest warrant that’s been out for her for nineteen years. Then a stranger shows up claiming to be Ozzie’s son and tries to throw her out, so she swings a reproduction of the Maltese Falcon at him, and just as she’s about to finish him off in a rage, somebody grabs him and throws him into the street.

Lucy Armstrong is a director of television commercials who's just been recruited to finish a four-day action movie shoot. But she arrives on the set to discover that the directing staff has quit, the make-up artist is suicidal, the stars are egomaniacs, the stunt director is her ex-husband, and the lead actor has just acquired as an advisor a Green Beret who has the aggravating habit of always being right.

Liz Danger has returned home after fifteen years to deliver a giant teddy bear for her mother’s birthday (color: Guilt Red) when a cop with a great ass picks her up for speeding, fixes the missing lug nuts on her back wheel, pulls her out of a ditch, doesn’t give her a ticket, and helps her avoid her family. This is a man with real potential. The rest of the day goes downhill, starting with her finding out that the only man she’s ever loved is getting married to Lavender Blue, the most beautiful woman in southern Ohio. Really, the best thing in her day is that cop with the lug nuts.

Agnes Crandall's life goes awry when a dognapper invades her kitchen one night, seriously hampering her attempts to put on a wedding that she's staked her entire net worth on. Then a hero climbs through her bedroom window. His name is Shane - no last name, just Shane - and he has his own problems.

Shane and Agnes are getting married, Lisa Livia is standing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in love with a Duke (sort of), and Phoebe is on the trail of a traitor. Of course, none of that is as simple as it appears as the after-effects of the Red Wedding reverberate at Two Rivers, Lisa Livia’s romantic interlude is interrupted by an attempted killing and Phoebe learns getting to the traitor is going to involve going through an obstacle course of the world’s most dangerous, and eccentric, assassins. Add in Sam the Cleaner, who is more than he appears, and Bert, an apparently washed up ...