The Private Eye

Josh January is a private investigator who has been badly beaten up by his work and is not in a hurry to take another case. Maggie Gladstone runs a bed and breakfast, reads detective fiction and has a firm idea of what an investigator ought to be. When odd things start happening at the inn, Josh agrees to look into them, planning to treat the job as a rest and to spend the time persuading Maggie to spend it with him. He is wrong about both. The trouble at the inn is more serious than he assumes, and Maggie turns out to be considerably harder to manage than he expects.

Maggie is the reason the case is not as simple as he assumes: she has a firm picture of what a private investigator is supposed to be, and the trouble at the inn turns out to be more than the small annoyances he was expecting. Josh's plan to treat the job as a rest and spend the time persuading her is not one he gets to keep.