''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.