Daisy Adams was an enterprising twenty-six-year-old graduate student. She’d written a cookbook called Bones for Bowser, and somehow, through sheer tenacity, she’d managed to turn a gimmick into a five-minute slot on WZZZ every Monday morning. She filled her airtime with dog stories and gave detailed directions on how to make homemade dog biscuits, dog soup, and dog stew. She’d become the darling of the morning DJs on the FM stations, who made her the brunt of their jokes, referring to her as the “Dog Lady of Snore,” hitting on a tender subject for Steve Crow and his unfortunate luck in call letters.

A few wisps of bangs straggled over her forehead, tortoiseshell combs held her blond hair swept back from her temples, and big, loose curls tumbled in a luxuriant mass down the back of her head and neck to an inch below her shoulders. Her eyes were big and blue, her nose small, her mouth wide. She had a gamine quality to her face that was completely misleading because there wasn’t an ounce of gamine in her personality. Her ex-boyfriend had compared her to Attila the Hun, but most people thought she was more like the human version of the Little Engine That Could.