So Heather makes the decision to take on yet another new career: as spunky girl detective!īut her new job comes with few benefits, no cheering crowds, and lots of liabilities, some of them potentially fatal. who owns the brownstone where she lives-even when more students start turning up dead in equally ordinary and subtly sinister ways.

Yet no one wants to listen-not the police, her colleagues, or the P.I. The cops and the college president are ready to chalk the death off as an accident, the result of reckless youthful mischief. That is, until the dead body of a female student from Heather’s residence hall is discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Now that the glamour and glory days of endless mall appearances are in the past, Heather’s perfectly happy with her new size 12 shape (the average for the American woman!) and her new job as an assistant dorm director at one of New York’s top colleges. That was before she left the pop-idol life behind after she gained a dress size or two-and lost a boyfriend, a recording contract, and her life savings (when Mom took the money and ran off to Argentina). Plus Tad's been working himself up to ask her a Big Question, which Heather's not sure she has an answer for. With fame beckoning her back into show business (as the star of a new kids' show!) it's a really bad time to get wrapped up in another homicide. And when the latest murdered corpse to clutter up her jurisdiction turns out to be her exceedingly unlovable boss, Heather finds herself on the shortlist of prime suspects-along with the rabble-rousing boyfriend of her high-strung student assistant and an indecently handsome young campus minister who's been accused of taking liberties with certain girls' choir members. Of course every silver lining ultimately has some black cloud attached. Best of all, nobody has died lately in 'Death Dorm,' the aptly nicknamed student residence that Heather assistant-directs.

She still yearns for her hot landlord, Cooper Cartwright, but her relationship with 'rebound beau,' vigorous vegan math professor Tad Tocco, is more than satisfactory. Her freeloading ex-con dad is finally moving out. Life is reasonably rosy for plus-size ex-pop star turned Assistant Dormitory Director and sometime sleuth Heather Wells.

Big Boned by Meg Cabot