Slay Me Tender (forthcoming October 2001, New Victoria Press) continues the adventures of Aubrey Lyle, stripper and amateur sleuth.

Slay Me finds Aubrey temporarily relocated to San Francisco's Tenderloin. Incredibly, gentrification is affecting even that last resort part of the city, and her new neighbors consider Aubrey part of the element bringing their property values down. The former occupant of her apartment, porn star Plushious Velvett, is missing. Mysterious attacks suggest that more is going on in the block's massage parlor than its blank facade reveals. Soon Aubrey is involved in the thick of the Tenderloin's politics—the tensions between incoming Yuppies and on-the-way-out poor, between newly-forming homeowners' associations and long-established Asian gangs. When her investigation of the missing porn star brings her too close to the workings of one of the neighborhood's cartels, life on the block becomes dangerous for Aubrey.