Shayne isn't one to say no to a gorgeous, rich young doll who gets absolutely everything she wants — and what she wants is him. But he changes his tune when he finds her cold and lifeless body on his bed. The dead girl's stepfather is a slippery politician who'd be happy to watch Shayne fry — for a crime he didn't commit. Mike Shayne knows it's a frame-up. But what exactly is the game… and who's calling the plays?

A young Miami insurance executive can’t remember whether or not he’s a killer. He remembers a red-headed man who once said, “Murder is my business.” That’s how Mike Shayne gets into the case of amnesia, alibis, and anguish in Miami Beach and the Florida Keys

She was a full blown brunette in a bandanna halter that just covered the essentials. The non-essentials were very impressive too. This was just the kind of case Shayne could enjoy. Keeping an eye on a dish like this and getting paid for it to boot

A cryptic note concealed in a DEAD MAN’S DIARY causes Mike Shayne to return to the past, to trace the secret of the dead man’s life — and he finds himself dangerously involved in murder, both past and present. In A TASTE FOR COGNAC, Mike and a copper-haired girl reporter from New York uncover the crime story of the year — but twenty-four terror-filled hours on a gunmen’s island hideaway create some reasonable doubt whether they will live to tell it. In DINNER AT DUPRE’S, one of Mike Shayne’s clients gets rubbed out in the French Quarter of New Orleans before he can get to Mike’s office. And the client’s untimely death gets Mike into a deep dish of homicide, blackmail, bigamy, kidnaping, and assorted other skulduggery. The cops are after Mike’s blood and nothing but a game of dodge and run saves his license and his skin

He was a middle-aged, medium-sized, unobtrusive sort of man, with the stamp of upper-class conservatism on his clothing and features and he lay sprawled on his back on a sidewalk in Miami Beach, Florida with a bullet-hole between his eyes. There was no trace of identification on his body excepting a folded and well-thumbed newspaper clipping containing a highly-colored account of some of Michael Shayne’s most notable cases, and a notation indicating that he had an early appointment with the private detective in his Miami office the next morning. So it was perfectly natural that Peter Painter, aggressive Chief of Detectives of Miami Beach and an avowed enemy of Mike Shayne’s, should haul the rangy redhead across Biscayne Bay at midnight to identify the murder victim. And it was a foregone conclusion that Painter would angrily disbelieve Shayne when he looked at the dead man and denied having seen him before and also flatly denied having a nest-day appointment with the corpse or with anyone else. Preferring to believe that Shayne was refusing to make an identification for reasons of his own, Painter acidly ordered him away from the scene and back to his own side of the Bay, and to keep his nose out of the case from that moment onward. So, of course, from that moment onward Mike Shayne is into the case up to his neck — one jump ahead of Peter Painter for a tumultuous twenty-four hours as action-packed as any similar period in the private detective’s past. It’s the redhead’s 31st Case to be chronicled by Brett Halliday, and one of his most exciting and puzzling to date