MURDER IN MONACO

"It began as one of those casual dates...I'd met her the night before in Monte Carlo." So begins agent Hart Muldoon's latest mystery. Nancy Trippe works for National Alert, a tell-all magazine, and offers him four thousand dollars for a job finding some stolen letters that "might involve murder." When Muldoon visits the publisher's mistress, Amy Grant, he finds that murder is indeed involved-Charles Pless has just been poisoned. Someone substituted cyanide for his adrenalin heart pill. Now it's up to Muldoon to track down the letters while trying to discover who killed the promiscuous publisher. Was it Alva Creighton, author of the compromising letters? Harold Jones, her body-building boyfriend, trying to protect her? Ballentine Black, the blackmailing ex-agent? Or Trippe herself, working her way up the ladder of success?

DEATH'S LOVELY MASK

Hart Muldoon is in Venice on a case for the U.S. government, only this time he is asked to betray a lover: "It was getting to be deep down in somebody else's dream now...Too many villains and too few cops. A Prince in love, an Arab drowned in the Grand Canal, a whore spouting romantic nonsense beneath pornographic pictures in a beach cabana, hatchet men in unlikely guise moving toward a Masked Ball and a payoff, a jerk husband trying to hire me to track myself down to his wife's bed, a salty old New England character whose motives were apparently far from what I had first suspected, and above all a girl named Linda whose cool and level gaze had sent me skittering toward the cliffs of guilt. Linda whom I saw as damned and yet who had crawled under my skin as no other woman had been able to do..."