title: Death in a Funhouse Mirror
author: Kate Clark Flora
description: Less than a year after solving her sister's murder in <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0812534298/${0}">Chosen for Death</a></i>, the superbly witty and decidedly feisty Thea Kozak is once again faced with murder very close to home. When the mother of her college roommate is slain near her well-appointed suburban home, Thea steals time away from her educational consulting business to investigate the crime--but not without first confronting the well-founded objections of her detective lover, Andre Lemieux. A truly unusual amateur detective, Thea struggles with emotional baggage, a deceitful employee, and even a fashion crisis as she seeks to uncover the truth. In her second Thea Kozak novel, author Kate Flora again offers up a remarkably entertaining and engaging character-driven plot that examines the intricacies of dysfunctional family life, emotional intimacy, and indivudual identity.
zlib_text:   1. [Chapter 1](chapter-1.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  ![cover-image, The Dead](images/cover-image.png)
  
  
  
  
  
  Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she
  brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground
  floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell
  clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another
  guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss
  Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom
  upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there,
  gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of
  the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask
  her who had come.
  
  It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who
  knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the
  members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils th