Maizie Albright vs. Gen Z in a Humorous PI Mystery

When I wrote NC-17, my kids were teenagers, and if you'd asked them what they were watching, they wouldn't have said Netflix. They'd have said YouTube. They learned choreography from YouTube. They picked up crafts from YouTube. My youngest was obsessed with what she called “satisfying videos” — people frosting cakes, organizing stationery, that sort of thing. She informed me these were technically ASMR videos. She had no idea what ASMR actually stood for. Neither did I, until I looked it up for this book.

(2026 update, for the record: my kids are grown now. They don't watch YouTube anymore. I do. Almost exclusively. Mostly Japanese housewives cooking and gardening. I've found my ASMR niche.)

I bring this up because it's basically the whole premise of NC-17, Book 3 in my humorous PI mystery series, Maizie Albright Star Detective. Maizie spent years playing Julia Pinkerton, Teen Detective — professionally, she was Hollywood's resident expert on being a teenager. So when a group of actual teenagers shows up at her office needing a PI, she assumes this is finally her lane.

She is wrong within about a page and a half.

The teenagers in question run a YouTube channel called Bigfoot Trackers, and their producer has gone missing under circumstances the police have filed somewhere between “not our problem” and “you want us to investigate a possible Bigfoot connection?” Naturally, Maizie takes the case nobody else will. That's more or less her whole personality by Book 3.

Her assistants, Tiffany and Rhonda, are not on board:

“I do have one case. But the clients are teenagers."

“Are you kidding me?” asked Tiffany. “Get a real case.”

Maizie disagrees — partly professional pride, partly a genuinely soft heart. Here's her read on her new clients, sizing them up in the office doorway:

“They were iGeneration. I think ‘embittered with dashed dreams’ was more of a Millennial thing.”

And a little later, after the teens decide she's not who they need after all and walk off:

“I'd built a previous career on being a teenager and appealing to teens. Or so I'd thought. I had a soft spot for them, particularly considering I never got to experience the rites of passage typical to American high schoolers. If I'd had the chance of participating in Bigfoot hunts on the weekend instead of Teen Vogue shoots, I would have become a stronger person. I was sure of it.”

That's Maizie in a nutshell — turning her own weird, over-scrutinized childhood into a joke and a genuine ache in the same breath. She figures out fast that having once played a teenager on TV isn't the same as understanding actual teenagers, who, in her own words, “hated being told their opinions weren't valid. They also didn't like to be patronized.” Generationally speaking, that tracks.

This one was fun to write, because the generational-whiplash jokes were basically just my own living room at the time, filtered through Hollywood and a missing Bigfoot influencer.

Every book in this romantic detective series gives me an excuse to poke at something actually on my mind — Hollywood versus small-town Georgia for the series overall, teenagers versus everybody for this one — and NC-17 is still one I laugh at on a re-read, which either means it holds up or I have a very specific sense of humor. Possibly both.

If you want to watch a former teen-detective-on-TV get thoroughly out-maneuvered by real teenagers (plus an actual missing-persons case, plus her mother's wedding, because Maizie never gets just one problem at a time), NC-17 is Book 3 in the Maizie Albright Star Detective series. Start here: books2read.com/NC17

New to the series? It starts with 15 MINUTES, and it's free everywhere: books2read.com/15