We open in an art gallery, where a very small number of people are browsing some very silly multimedia sculptures and installations, all of which involve video feeds. Every time we see a scene like this, I get distracted thinking about the props people and set dressers who put the whole thing together. Like, who built all this "artwork," and whose idea was it to use urinals? Anyway, I'm hoping there's a dead body behind one of those freestanding pieces, but no such luck; this is one of those ominous Criminal Intent-style openings that sets up the crime about to occur. (That would be reason No. 1 why I never watch Criminal Intent.) The artist, a twitchy, pale fellow named Bradley, complains about the poor turnout. "They're destroying us," he hisses to a woman at his side. She assures him she's not going to "let that happen."

At last, a corpse! It belongs to Sofia Cameron, the very woman who just called Bradley "baby," and who is discovered the next morning slumped in her car with a bullet wound to the head. Lupo shows up with his new partner, Bernard, and it's just too bad if you had enough of Anthony Anderson's repetitive line readings and I-mean-business face-pulling last week, because Green is gone and Anderson is in the opening credits. The detectives find a gun in the car, but no note. In what will have to pass for a teaser-ending wisecrack, Bernard pulls out a small bakery box and observes that it seems odd for Sofia to be "bringing cupcakes to a suicide." I don't know -- for a last-meal option, they look pretty decadent. But if I brought them, I'd sure as hell eat them. Where Sofia's gone, no one worries about calories.

After the credits, the detectives quiz a stunned-looking Bradley Cameron about his whereabouts when Sofia was murdered. He says he was working in his studio, and he believed Sofia had gone to visit her mother in Jersey. Lupo discovers that Sofia was an author -- but not a novelist, as the Yahoo episode summary would have it; in fact, she was an investigative journalist, judging from the cheery-looking Rwandan genocide study Lupes is holding up for the camera. Brad says Sofia wasn't suicidal, and he can't imagine where she would have gotten a gun. Nosy Lupo finds three manuscript chapters of Sofia's new book, but still no suicide note. Bernard is skeptical that a writer wouldn't leave a note. "On the other hand," Lupo replies -- wisecrack alert! -- "Three chapters in five years? That would make me suicidal."

So the boys go to see Sofia's publisher, who tells them she had recently put Sofia's book "on the back burner." Publisher-lady doesn't think that could have driven Sofia to suicide, though it did piss off Bradley, who believed that Sofia was being sabotaged by "Kate Westwood, of all people." Scoff! Of all people! Wait -- who's Kate Westwood? Publisher-lady tells us she's a popular indie actress who recently wrote a children's book.