''My favourite American crime-writer''

As usual, crime is a boom industry in Los Angeles. A gunman walks into a café and shoots a waitress dead, seemingly at random. A schoolgirl is shot from a passing car. A prostitute trying to escape her job is killed by her pimp. Then there''s the kidnapped daughter, the shot father and the strangled nurse who scrawls a clue to her assailant''s identity.

The Glendale Police Department is being kept very busy with these cases and more off-beat conundrums, including a series of burglaries in which nothing is stolen and a string of break-ins that could only have been committed by midgets or contortionists.