After an adventuresome summer involving a dead body in her trunk at the Iowa State Fair, Tressa Jayne Turner is heading back to school in nearby Des Moines. She has a love/hate relationship with her carpooling buddies -- she loves her cousin Frankie, but hates his girlfriend Dixie. Since she's a local newspaper reporter, Tressa is taking journalism classes and eager for a great assignment. She's very interested in her friends' criminal law class after Dixie notices an eerie similarity between her lecture notes and a campus crime spree.

Whenever the professor introduces a new offense, the same crime is committed that night on the college campus. Littering and vandalism soon progress towards mugging, hit- and-run and worse. Tressa and her friends cannot convince the local authorities to take the matter seriously, so they take matters into their own hands. Tressa earned her nickname Calamity Jayne by getting into more than her fair share of trouble, but since the next crimes on the syllabus are rape and murder, she and her friends work overtime to find the serial-criminal before it's too late.

Kathleen Bacus lets the personalities of her distinctive characters run free with sharp dialogue and quick-witted introspection. More outlandish than Stephanie Plum, more unorthodox than Nancy Drew and funnier than anything I've read in a long time, this Tressa Jayne Turner chick-lit comedy mystery is a guaranteed good time!

Book Summary

Ace cub reporter Tressa Jayne Turner is carrying a full load — and we’re not talking post-holiday pounds. Back in college for the fourth time (but who’s counting?), she’s also looking to nab a raise from her stingy boss at the Gazette. So, what’s to stop her from making the grade? Could it be the botched betrothal that’s more than just schoolyard gossip? Or maybe it’s the two men in hot pursuit of her heart. And let’s not forget the campus criminal that’s out to teach the student body a lesson — one crime at a time. It’s a case of murder and mayhem by the books… and failure is so not an option.