Emily Lime, whose name reads the same backwards as forwards, is a photographer and word-lover-at-large. Her Brooklyn neighborhood teems with eccentrics and their myriad pets-and Emily is proud to call many of them her friends. Although the thirtysomething crossword junkie is flying solo and down on her financial luck, she's learned to be happy with life's simple pleasures.

Things get complicated when Marcus Mead, Emily's dog-walker-cum-Scrabble-rival, comes into the picture. Widely considered an oddball, the endearing twenty-year-old has unwittingly become Emily's absurd, unrequited love. The only problem (besides the sixteen-year age difference) is that Marcus's father is Emily's paranoid, unsavory ex-husband-and he wants her dead. More specifically, he wants Marcus to kill her. And now it'll take some cunning to solve the puzzle that is their lives...