Wanda Weatherby had made her final pitch half an hour before when she phoned Mike with an urgent plea for help.He'd been curious about her — who she was and what she wanted from him, and what she meant to the other people who had called him earlier.Now she'd never be able to tell him or anyone. So Mike had to fill in the details himself and none of them were pretty.Strange parties, blackmail and murder were just a few of the ugly facts Shayne has to uncover to find out… What Really Happened.

Suddenly there was an electrifying fanfare from the orchestra, and bright blue moonlight flared out from the semi-circle of spots on the floor.Dorinda leaped from nowhere. The clean, taut lines of her slim, nude body were breathtakingly beautiful. Abandon and wild desire were in every movement of her lovely, supple form.Just a sweet little college girl from a nice family taking some extra curricular courses in exotic dancing at a joint called La Roma.No one could dance like Dorinda. Shayne had to admit she was dynamite, but her explosive act was about to be broken up by murder.

COPS AND CORPSES

That was the name of the game, and Mike Shayne was playing every lead as if his life depended on it — because it did.

The Miami cops were putting on heat strong enough to burn his license. The corpses kept turning up, one, two, three. To top it off, his secretary was being framed for murder by an unknown killer who was determined to put her and Mike out of the picture, one way or another.

Who’d ever think that things would reach such a pass in Miami that Mike Shayne would come to the rescue of his arch-enemy, Peter Painter?

Well, that’s the situation in the Redhead’s 40th case. The dapper chief of detectives of Miami Beach plays things just a little too close to his chest this time, concealing vital information that might clear a convicted murderer until the very last moment before his execution to cash in on the publicity value; and then getting himself kidnapped by a ruthless gang of killers who are determined to keep him out of circulation until an innocent man is electrocuted.

Mike Shayne really doesn’t care whether Peter Painter comes out of it alive or not — though he does realize that life would lose some of its savor if there were no Peter Painter for him to needle. But he is concerned about a miscarriage of justice... egged on by the lovely and willing wife of the accused man, and the lovely and not-unwilling widow of the victim.

Ironically enough, while all the clues point to Shayne as Painter’s probable kidnapper and while all the detectives of Miami and Miami Beach are combing the twin cities for the rangy Redhead, he is engaged in an electrifying struggle against time to locate Painter and save him despite himself.

It takes a bomb thrown into the hospital room of a paralyzed man (occupied by Shayne) and the deliberate sinking of a luxury cruiser in the waters of Biscayne Bay (with Painter trapped below decks) to bring this fast-paced story to an exciting and unpredictable climax.

This country’s toughest private eye, and Miami’s most-publicized citizen has never been in a tighter spot or fought his way through against greater odds.

If you watch the Redhead’s synthetic adventures on NBC TV every Friday night, you’ll enjoy reading this to discover what the original stories are really like.