Part of Series
Lt. Frank Hastings gets a case that has all the material to create a colorful tableau of murder. Thomas King, film maker, wealthy but profligate, ends up slashed and dead in the apartment of a girl who poses nude by day and sells sex by night. A trail of evidence leads to Arnold Clark. It figures: Clark has a rap sheet a mile-long—and he's been keeping King's wife company. Case closed? Not quite. A second murder introduces contradictory new evidence. Now Hastings has to rework the entire puzzle to come up with a finished portrait of a crime—with no pieces left over. "Wilcox shuffles the plot and characters for the sheer joy of confounding us. Great detective fun." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)
Author
Aka Carter Wick Collin Wilcox was an American mystery writer. Born in Detroit, Michigan, his first book was The Black Door (1967), featuring a sleuth possessing extrasensory perception. His major series of novels was about Lieutenant Frank Hastings of the San Francisco Police Department. Titles in the Hastings series included Hire a Hangman, Dead Aim, Hiding Place, Long Way Down and Stalking Horse. Two of his last books, Full Circle and Find Her a Grave, featured a new hero-sleuth, Alan Bernhardt, an eccentric theater director. Wilcox also published under the pseudonym "Carter Wick". Wilcox's most famous series-detective was the television character Sam McCloud, a New Mexico deputy solving New York crime. The "urban cowboy" was played by Dennis Weaver in the 1970-1977 TV series McCloud. Wilcox wrote three novelizations based on scripts from the series: McCloud (1973), The New Mexican Connection (1974), and The Park Avenue Executioner (1975).
