Knife at My Back

Private detective Steve Conacher tails a runaway wife to a luxury Catskills resort for a weekend of fun, sun, and murder. When popular cartoonist Lawrence Lariar decided to moonlight as a mystery writer, creating comic book artist turned amateur sleuth Homer Bull was a natural. From the 1940s through the 1960s, Lariar continued to switch from sketching caricatures to sketchy characters, writing hardboiled crime fiction under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France, and creating a series of memorable gumshoes. The Montford Hotel in the Catskills is a fabulous playground for the rich and beautiful-like Grace Lasker, the high-class Park Avenue knockout Conacher's been hired to eyeball at the behest of her jealous husband. But the simple skip trace turns to murder when Conacher finds the young lovely stabbed to death in her suite. That her body disappears is just the first distraction in the investigation. The others come fast and loose: a high voltage Broadway torch singer on a stopover to Hollywood; a sultry rhumba teacher who offers free lessons to the right man; and a high-diving swimming star with slippery limbs and a broad mind. They aren't the only ones with secrets. Grace had her share of them, too. As the motives for her murder mount, Conacher realizes that Grace won't be the last guest not to make it out of the Montford alive. Knife at My Back is the 3rd book in the PI Steve Conacher Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.