In the interest of full disclosure, this is not a full length book, but rather a novella. And I think I've read it before, it certainly sounded very familiar.
Fay and Anita are roommates who were both casually dating the same man, Dane Grover (these names, Gardner! Seriously?!). Dane and Fay start to get serious and get engaged. Anita is jealous and upset. She's secretly seeing a married man, Carver, who has an apartment upstairs from them. Anita leaves to go out with Carver, who tells her to go wait down in the car. She does, but after twenty minutes she gets angry and goes back up to his apartment and finds him dead. She panics, since a lot of her things are in his place. She quickly hatches a plan. She goes back to her apartment, fixes herself and Fay cups of hot chocolate laced with sleeping pills. Fay drinks hers and passes out. Anita takes some of Fay's things upstairs and swaps them out for her things, comes back and drinks her chocolate and passes out.
Carver's corpse had a big red lipstick print on his forehead, hence the name of the story, and that's how Mason catches the killer, too. It was a good story, I enjoyed it.
I love this cover. Seriously, what the heck does it have to do with anything?! Nothing, is the answer. The main female character is a woman in her fifties. And no one played darts. Too bad, I bet Paul would have been very good at it.
This is it. The very last Mason book I had left to read. I still have one more novella and a short story, but other than that, I'm done.
Selma Anson and Delane Arlington are in love. Arlington's meddling niece, Mildred, is unhappy about it and thinks Selma is just a gold-digger. Selma's first husband died a year earlier from food poisoning after attending a barbeque at Arlington's house, but now the insurance company thinks he was poisoned with arsenic from Selma's bird mounting hobby (a really gross hobby, in my opinion, that part bothered me a lot. Hunting for food is one thing, but killing innocent little birds just to mount them for fun is icky).
It had a happy ending (they usually do) and it was an interesting read.
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