In almost all good mystery stories, the detective's magnifying glass doubles as a mirror. The hero looks for clues to solve a crime, sure, but the real search is internal, and the questions basic: "Could I have been the murderer? Could I have been the murdered?" Leah Stewart's debut novel Body Of A Girl stays firmly in that noirish self-investigatory mode. The protagonist is 25-year-old Memphis crime reporter Olivia Dale, who in the first chapter finds herself staring at the bound, half-naked corpse of Allison Avery. The victim's build and facial structure resemble the journalist's, and as she takes the routine tour of friends, families, and cops, Dale makes presumptions about Avery's character. Then, one by one, those presumptions are shot down: She wasn't a cheerleader, a prude, or a goody-two-shoes medical student; she was a lusty musician working at a hospital to appease her strict mother. And like Dale would be (were she dead), Avery is remembered as an independent woman with an interest in rock 'n' roll and recreational drug use. As the newswoman tours the Memphis streets, she finds herself traveling in the same circles as the victim, ostensibly to get her story straight. She dates the same men, has a slightly perverse relationship with Avery's 17-year-old brother, and even wears Avery's pink wig while traveling to seedy bars to find out what sort of drugs the dead woman bought. Stewart has her narrator indiscriminately violate journalistic ethics as she first feigns sympathy to get good copy, then finds herself so sympathetic to her subject that she's almost willing to put herself in the exact position that led Allison Avery to a messy death. And here's where the author clobbers her readers and her heroine. Throughout the book, in direct, well-chosen words, Stewart has Dale step outside herself to ponder how her own murder would be covered by a reporter like herself. The sucker-punch of this queasily insistent mystery story is that when Dale crosses boundaries to find out how low Avery would sink, she reports on her own capacity for degradation. She doesn't just presume the worst about her doppelgänger; she presumes the worst about herself.