It's 10:30 pm, and Mike Shayne is sipping cognac, ruminating on the perfection of Lucy Hamilton's fried chicken, when a shotgun fires upstairs. Following the acrid stench of gunpowder to a locked door halfway down the hall, Shayne has no choice but to batter it down, tumbling face first into the scene of a particularly ugly double suicide. The woman lies on the floor in the middle of the sitting room, her face twisted by the deadly kiss of cyanide. A few feet beyond her body is what remains of a man, his head obliterated by the shotgun's blast.
The woman's father is one of Miami's power brokers, and he refuses to believe that his daughter would end her life over a silly affair. Isn't it possible, he asks, that she was murdered? Convinced or not, Shayne is the only man ruthless enough to find out.
