Live at 10:00, Dead at 10:15: A Sonya Iverson Novel

Elsa Klensch, former host of CNN's "Style with Elsa Klensch," has an insider's knowledge of the fashion industry's most flamboyant personalities coupled with an outsider's sharp-eyed objectivity. In" Live at 10, Dead at 10:15," Klensch brilliantly evokes the worlds of fashion and design through the eyes of Sonya Iverson, ambitious Midwesterner striving to succeed in New York City. As a producer for the network newsmagazine "The Donna Fuller Show," Sonya is frustrated at always having to work on "fluff"-but she never expected her big break to come in the middle of the annual American Fashion Awards dinner.Sonya steps into the elegant powder room of New York City's 42nd Street Library to discover a just-out-of-rehab supermodel clutching what appears to be a bloody dagger and standing over the body of the glamorous wife of a fashion industry mogul. Sonya's first call is to the newsroom; the police come second. The dead woman, Harriett Franklin, was widely admired for her charitable work but nearly universally disliked, Sonya discovers as she interviews clothing designers, models, fashion magazine editors, and industry bigwigs. Harriett was scheming and manipulative, determined to have her way in everything from naming the new perfume being developed by the House of Franklin to keeping her Down Syndrome son in a treatment facility far from the spotlight. Suspects abound. Was the killer the supermodel, whose comeback Harriett was threatening to derail? The internationally-renowned designer recently fired at Harriett's bidding? The fashion magazine editor Harriett first bribed and then blackmailed? Or even Harriett's long-suffering husband, who may have finally had all he could take of his shrewish wife? Eager to break this career-making story, Sonya quickly learns many dark secrets about the seamy underside of the fashion industry. Sonya's next interview might be her last . . . .