Bert E. Friedlob

Guilty - beyond a reasonable doubt - such is the incontrovertible law which pardons the innocent and condemns the guilty. But just how fallible is the process of law? To what extent can deceit, prejudice and the cruel powers of fate intervene to set a murderer free, or send an innocent man to the electric chair ... Crusading publisher Austin Spenser wants to prove a point about the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence. Spencer talks his prospective...

Gertrude Lawrence was a musical comedy star who started out as an ambitious bit actress and moved her way up to being the toast of London and Broadway. Her success is offset by a stormy private life, which is given some additional ballast when she falls in love with an American financier. Gertrude was temperamental, sarcastic, profane and at times, self-destructive.

"Ask mother" says the message scrawled in lipstick at a muder scene by an unknown serial killer who preys on women. It's a sensational story - if it bleeds, it leads - and a news conglomerate offers a big promotion to the high-level company exec who solves the case. So begins the wheeling, dealing and backstabbing of the competing media hotshots as they vie to unmask the so-called Lipstick Killer.