Counterfeit for Murder was first serialized as The Counterfeiter's Knife in three issues of The Saturday Evening Post andpublished later, in book form, in Homicide Trinity. It starts whit Hattie Annis, the owner of a boardinghouse who doesn't like cops, showing up at Wolfe's door with a brown paper package containing stacks of $20 bills. She thinks that there could be a reward for returning the money and won't trust the cops with it. As Wolfe is busy with the orchids, she leaves the package with Archie and says she will come back later. When she returns, Hattie collapses at Wolfe’s doorstep. On her way back, a car swerved onto the sidewalk and hit her just enough to shake her up. Revived by Fritz's coffee, she tells Wolfe and Archie about the money, that turns out to be counterfeit. Wolfe won't take Hattie as a client, but allows Archie to accompany her to the boardinghouse she owns, and investigate. There, Archie meets Hattie's three actors and a dancer—Hattie caters to stage people. The fifth boarder, however, is found dead on the floor with a kitchen knife in her chest. Hattie is carried away to be interrogated. Archie talks Wolfe into bailing her out, discovers that the dead woman was a Treasury agent, and at the end returns to the brownstone to find all concerned—boarders, Inspector Cramer, Sgt. Stebbins, Agent Leach, and Saul Panzer—in Wolfe’s office where the mystery is unraveled.