Mauve & Murder (2000)

Barbara Burnett Smith's mystery, published by Five Star in 2000 by an author whose acknowledgements recall sixteen years in broadcasting, is set at Y-96, an Austin radio station where Cassie Ferris, who moved to the city so that her daughter Jenny could attend the University of Texas, works the morning show beside the tantrum-prone disc jockey Roger Weber. When Weber dies after claiming he had been poisoned, Sergeants Root and Socorro of the Austin Police Department question a staff with many reasons to hate him. (Open Library)

Watches

Gucci (unidentified model): Rachel Sankey, the red-haired account executive who has been at the station through seven years and two changes of ownership, sweeps her Mont Blanc pen into her briefcase and escapes with Cassie into the elevator before Roger Weber, raging over an unchanged promo sheet, can reach her as the account executive for Happy Twosomes. As the car shudders to a stop she lifts her arm to look at the Gucci watch almost buried under her gold bangles and curses her ruined schedule. In the closing chapters she turns on Cassie with yellow jasmine. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: She lifted her arm to look at the Gucci watch almost buried under the gold bangles. "This will throw my whole schedule off! Oh, hell, and I forgot I have ascertainments this afternoon. (Barbara Burnett Smith, Mauve & Murder, scan cataloged as Five Star, 2000, p. 28, where the quotation continues; she is introduced as the account executive for Happy Twosomes on p. 27, and the yellow jasmine is on p. 261; Internet Archive scan OCR)