Lucky Linderhof is thirteen, cute, worryingly precocious, and sassy. She's also in a juvenile-detention facility awaiting trial for the murder of the man she calls Roger Fishbite.

Lucky's beautiful, dysfunctional mother, "an old-movie girl thrust into a world of cell phones and E-mail," had taken refuge from a failed marriage in exotic cocktails and weird furnishings - until the fateful day she decided to let her basement flat to a big, blond Texan who looked uncannily like her ex-husband, except for the gleam in his eyes.