Murder Takes No Holiday(1960)

Brett Halliday

The mild little guy was nervous when he walked into the U.S. Customs Office at Miami. He cheered up when he heard that informers didn't have to testify in court. He said they'd be hearing from him soon. But they never did. A few days later his body was found in Saint Albans, British West Indies, stabbed to death.
Was there big money involved? Michael Shayne thought so when he took over the case for the customs' men during his "holiday" in Saint Albans. The trail introduced him to as fascinating a set of characters as he had ever met -- Vivienne Larousse, Parisian dancer, cynical sultry, ready to do anything for an American visa; Paul Slater, trying desperately to conceal his affair with Vivienne from his hard-working wife, Martha; Luis Alvarez, alias the Camel, who was suspected of everything, but who had never been convicted of anything; and Cecil Powys, who claimed he was in Saint Albans to get material for a PhD thesis in anthropology, but who seemed to know a lot more about the usefulness of a straight left to the jaw.
Michael Shayne has to be fast on his feet and faster in his thinking to unravel this ingenious tangle of intrigue and passion in a story that moves with jet-speed from one dramatic action to the next and ends with a typical Shayne twist as logical as it is unexpected.