This fantastic debut crime novel from author Leigh Redhead draws more than a little bit on her former life as a stripper and table dancer in Melbourne's strip clubs and peepshows.

Simone Kirsch, private eye with a difference, always wanted to join the police force. She's smart, fit and wants to do good. But she has a problem. She has worked as a stripper for the last three years and the service won't let her in.

Instead, she enrols in an enquiry agent's course at a security college, tops the class and it looks like she might have some surveillance work coming up. It's all going to plan. But then her best friend Chloe - a fellow stripper who works at Melbourne's notorious The Red Room - is kidnapped by gangsters after its owner is murdered and Simone has two weeks to find the culprit and save Chloe's life.

Along the way she gets tangled up with Melbourne's most corrupt cop, some crazy strippers and a rockabilly band called Las Vegas Grind. She even manages to fall in and out of love - or is that lust - in the course of a fortnight, and sustains some pretty serious hangovers, all while racing the clock to rescue her best friend.

Peepshow is sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, a wild ride that takes you inside Melbourne's adult cinemas and lap dancing clubs. Simone is a sexy, sassy Tart-Noir heroine, kind of like Cliff Hardy, but with open leg work.