Are you one of those people who tend to crack a joke when you're in trouble? Is it because fear brings out the urge to laugh, or is it that laughter helps us get though the worst of times? And maybe it depends on who's in it with you. Like a good friend you can count on to watch your back.

Warmhearted Brooklyn sex therapist Saylor Oz and her sidekick, financial analyst/female boxer Benita Morales, are best friends who race through crime adventures bickering and bantering, sometimes blaming, but always forgiving each other, too.

Kind of like our marriage. Being a husband-wife team writing under one pseudonym, we sometimes feel like we're living a reality TV buddy movie. Combining our opposite qualities, we use the roller coaster dynamics of a relationship between two strong-willed people to help shape puzzling, funny, or dangerous relationships between our characters.

In her hunt to find the killer our height-challenged heroine accidentally ends up being part of a young genius designer's zany plan to tweak the fashion world's traditional concept of beauty.

Here are some of the people you'll meet in BABYDOLL. (A few may be dead, but you'll meet them anyway.) A young, Nuyorican artist doing time at Rikers for a murder he didn't commit, a daredevil boxer turned high-rise window washer, a burned out porn actress with a grudge, an aging hippy aunt and part-time nudist, a sexy P.I. who paints still lives, a womanizing agent on the hunt for virgin talent, a world famous lawyer with a bad case of self importance, a nubile fashion model who likes to party, a pretty boy Irish illegal who's good with the ladies and with a knife. Let's see, have we left anybody out? Oh, yeah . . . a pair of smarmy drug dealers with a runaway toilet, and a homeless man who only accepts bacon n' cheese.

Bang -- there it is.

Allyson Roy

(Roy & Alice)