The Corpse With The Sunburned Face

Classic Mystery Novel

It’s a heady cocktail of business, pleasure, and murder for Manhattan PI Steve Conacher, who’s cruising into danger in the Caribbean. 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. Now his classic whodunits are available as ebooks. For New York private dick and landlubber Steve Conacher, it’s a dream assignment: a free cruise to tropical San Juan to skip trace a budding young artist and runaway heiress. So far, the hunt for Nancy Scott is a pleasure—especially when his first contact is paradise incarnate. She’s smart, sexy, clever, and goes down as easy as a shot of aquavit. She’s also ready and willing to help Conacher on his search. Maybe that’s why somebody just throttled the fun-loving adventuress to death. Now Conacher is looking into a murder, too. When his colliding investigations lead to a mysterious art gallery in Puerto Rico, run by a half-blind painter, Conacher learns just how deeply involved he is in the sun-kissed secrets of two women—one missing, one dead—that are beginning to threaten his own life. The Sunburned Corpse is the 4th book in the PI Steve Conacher Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

“One of the most likeable sleuths to appear on the crime scene in quite a long time.” —The Washington Post Book World The man is found on the icy streets of Boston, vomit in his beard, alcohol in his system, and ice in his veins. The police assume he is just another in the dozens of derelicts whom the urban winter claims each year, but Brady Coyne knows better. Attorney to New England’s upper crust, he was the dead man’s lawyer, and he knows that Stuart Carver was no bum: He was a senator’s nephew. An author whose last book was so lousy that it became a bestseller, Carver was planning a serious novel, and was doing research on homelessness in the metropolis when he was killed. The icepick wound on his skull suggests he learned something that someone didn’t want to see in print. To find out who murdered his client, Brady will delve into an underworld that is even more cold, dark, and deadly than Boston in winter.

A dream vacation at a Mexican beach resort swiftly dissolves into a nightmare for criminologist and foodie Cait Morgan when her significant other, Bud Anderson, is wrongly arrested for the murder of the local florist. With Bud's freedom, and maybe even his life, at stake, Cait has to fight the clock to work out which member of the small Mexican community might have killed the respected florist, and why. Investigating under the watchful gaze of the local police, Cait has to keep her relationship with Bud a secret, and she soon discovers she's not the only one with something to hide. Peeling back layers of deceit to reveal even more puzzles, Cait struggles with a creeping sense of unreality as she desperately tries to save Bud--and, ultimately, herself.