The Princess and the P.I. - Softcover

Payne, Nikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593817362 ISBN 13: 9780593817360

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

An amateur online sleuth must enlist the help of a jaded PI to clear her name while taking down a shady tech start-up in this exhilarating romantic suspense novel.

Fiona Addai is ready to set her plan in motion. To honor the anniversary of her brother’s death, she’s going to steal back his brilliant invention from the ruthless corporation that stole and claimed it as their own. As a famed Reddit detective known as @Princess_PI, Fiona has used her online connections and sleuthing skills to time every step down to the minute. But with one disastrous misstep, instead of getting justice, Fiona finds herself accused of murder.

Maurice Bennett is no stranger to insomnia. These days, he’s not losing sleep over the cases he’s solving—but running from the one he couldn’t. Instead, he’s been settling for small-time scandals that don’t stir up the guilt he’s buried. But when he spots Fiona Addai at the center of a murder investigation, something clicks. And for the first time in a long while, Maurice feels that old spark of intrigue.

However, Fiona is not the helpless damsel she appears to be. Sure, she needs Maurice’s help to clear her name, but she’s got conditions of her own: she wants a crash course in real-world detective work. Maurice isn’t exactly thrilled. With every late-night stakeout and tension-filled interrogation, their partnership, rife with tension and unexpected chemistry, unravels a dangerous web of corporate crime and familial secrets. To bring the real killer to light, they'll need to trust each other and that might be the most dangerous gamble of all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

By day, Nikki Payne is a curious tech anthropologist asking the right questions to deliver better digital services. By night, she dreams of ways to subvert canon literature. She’s a member of Smut U, a premium feminist writing collective, and a cat lady with no cats.

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Do Crime

Fiona looked down at the convention program:

"Disrupting Orgasms: Leveraging Blockchain to Revolutionize the Female G-spot."

No.

"Post-Human Partnerships: How the Metaverse Will Save Love."

Definitely no.

"iVest: The Holy Grail of Health."

Fiona circled the last one.

This place was a kind of church, really. The Gaylord National Convention Center at National Harbor gleamed like a temple to excess. The reflective glass walls cut with multicolored lasers worked on the mind like stained glass. And inside, everybody used the same liturgical language of self-importance. Everyone's a disruptor, even the way all the Silicon Valley tech founders looked like Jesus. Fiona should have been at home here. Church was her first language. Her whole life had been pews and pulpits, worship, and waiting.

But she didn't come to praise today.

She looked around and allowed herself to feel the untethered contempt that had been roiling in her belly for years.

No, God wouldn't like the plans she'd made today. For nine months, her barely used agenda had exactly one date circled.

September 2nd. Do crime.

Fiona jumped at a sudden burst of applause to her right-an overly congratulatory standing ovation for hosting the event in Prince George's County. A largely Black, largely wealthy county in Maryland. If Atlanta was Black Mecca, Prince George's was Wakanda, where every high school was a mini HBCU and every modest home cost at least half a million dollars. Fiona couldn't cross the street without Black Excellence slapping her across the face.

She just kept telling herself to relax. Today was going to be just like any other day. The founders of iVest would preach about their invention like it was the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Except it wasn't their invention.

iVest initially sold tags to help pet owners identify their lost pets. In fact, their name wasn't even iVest. It was the appropriately bland Thorpe Solutions. Fiona's brother, Kwesi, had been their best developer, pouring himself into a project no one else thought worth their time. The idea had started simple: a vest that could deliver medication on schedule and monitor vital signs. Their mother's chemo treatments had been hell. Kwesi had dreamed up the vest as a way to retroactively save her, maybe even forgive himself for not being able to save her at all.

He'd trusted his company with the project, but more specifically, he'd trusted his boyfriend, Mark.

It'd been the worst mistake of his short life.

Now Mark's company would debut the vest as their own.

The thought of Mark's chin-implanted, Botoxed face holding that vest-her brother's legacy-while people fawned over his genius infuriated her. The vest had somehow become symbolic of Fiona's mother and her brother, both of them ripped away from her and both thinking the worst of her when they left.

Fiona wound her way through the throng, her senses overloaded by the clamor of everything. A robotic arm for feeding pets remotely, a refrigerator that tweets your grocery list. And sex. So much AI sex. Fiona wasn't sure people were interested in kissing real people anymore. She was suddenly embarrassingly aware of her father trailing behind her.

"Uh, Dad, you didn't have to come to this. I know you had a big appointment today."

Kofi Addai, senior pastor and self-proclaimed prophet, looked up to the heavens. Grim in his bespoke Ankara shirt, he followed her like a storm cloud. She could already hear his sermon, denouncing the sexbots and Wi-Fi fridges as the idols of a new Sodom. He said nothing, though, only cleared his throat in that way that meant judgment, the holiest kind of silence. Her ineptitude was legendary in the family. What weight she had gained and what colleges she had failed out of were the most common chatter in the aunties' WhatsApp.

It was Kwesi who sho

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593817362
• ISBN 13: 9780593817360
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 481
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House LLC; penguinrandomhouse@penguinrandomhouse.com; ; 1745 Broadway; New York; NY 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland