HARDY was a very private eye who preferred sex to slaughter, and classy cuisine to common crime. Pleasure before business was his motto, and the only way he got entangled in the case of a murdered beauty named Dorothy Robbins was when her lovely, loving sister Peg made Hardy a proposition he couldn’t turn down.

At first the caper seemed right up Hardy’s alley, as he moved through a New York underground of call girls and strippers, probing for the truth and enjoying every minute of it. But when warm bodies started turning into cold corpses, and Hardy wound up holding a bag full of Mafia money, he suddenly realized that this affair could be his kiss of death…