'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Helen is eighteen, respectable, modestly pretty; she disappears. Juanita isn't much older, and a stunner; she picks men up in bars and then robs them at gunpoint. Old Mrs Peller's bungalow has been broken into and she is found dead - but she had managed to shoot her assailant too.

It's all in a day's work for Detective-Sergeant Ivor Maddox and the rest of the Hollywood police department, who are as richly varied as the cases they investigate.