Murder and the Married Virgin by Brett Halliday

Book 10 in The Mike Shayne Mysteries

Mike Shayne investigates an impossible murder in the Big Easy

It’s not often that Mike Shayne runs with an honorable crowd, but there is a lieutenant in his office mourning the fiancée who killed herself the day before. Honest and heartbroken, he begs this hardened private investigator for help answering one simple, impossible question: Why? It’s a question Shayne has been asking ever since his wife was murdered in Miami and he moved to New Orleans to escape her memory. For the sake of a soldier, he will put his own mourning aside and try to explain a suicide that looks an awful lot like murder.

Katrin Moe was working as a maid in the home of a wealthy New Orleans family when she was found locked in her room, the gas pumping full blast. Coincidentally, a priceless emerald necklace went missing from the house a few days before and the insurance company hired Shayne to find it. On the hunt for a killer, Shayne will find that the necklace and the crook are more closely related than meets the eye.

“One of the best of the tough sleuths.” —The New York Times

“Unlike anything else in the genre.” —L. J. Washburn, author of For Whom the Funeral Bell Tolls

“Raw, ingenious storytelling . . . Pure pleasure.” —Shane Black, creator of Lethal Weapon and writer/director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, on Murder Is My Business