The brash and confident Sharon McCone is plunged into intrigue and murder as her snooping leads her to San Francisco's 'Painted Ladies', the landmark district of gaudily coloured Victorian houses. Responding to her old friend Jake Kaufmann's urgent call, Sharon is shocked to find him dead in a pool of red paint in the house he was restoring. Assuming that his killer will be found among the glamorous, fashionable figures of San Francisco's architectural community, Sharon is embroiled in the internal battles between the matronly, upper-crust preservationists, and the flamboyant defenders of the psychedelic houses. Her investigation narrows to the pursuit of a single, very valuable clue: a one-off Tiffany lamp with the grinning face of the Cheshire Cat emblazoned among the stained-glass leaves. But it is when Sharon herself is implicated in Jake's death that the pressure peaks - and it takes all of her daring to prove her innocence. Love, not money, is the motive for murder in this novel, the third in the Sharon McCone mystery series.