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