CASE FILE—HORROR!

Name: Honey West

Occupation: Private eye

Age: Over 21

Description: Taffy-colored hair, blue eyes

Identifying Marks: Small birthmark inside of right thigh

Warning: Usually armed — the nerviest, curviest, brainiest, sexiest private eye ever to pull a trigger, or toss three gangland bozos overboard singlehanded.

Residence: Los Angeles.

I'm Honey West, private eye, and I've been invited to one of the wildest birthday parties in recent history. Before I'm even out of the parking lot I've met...the devil, complete with red skin, horns and a barbed tail; a spaceman right out of a Buck Rogers movie, and a Neanderthal right out of the stone age—and I get mistaken for the Dragon Lady.

There was nothing strange about that, though, it was a birthday and retirement party for a famous director of horror films. Real horror came later, when I found the dead body in a mummy case. It was no two-thousand-year-old, bandage-wrapped corpse, but the horror movie director's very young wife.

Homicide Lieutenant Mark Storm wanted me to drop the case, marry him and quit the detective business before I turned up in the same condition. But I told him that would never happen until I had done what I had become a P. I. for in the first place, and tracked down the man or men responsible for my own father's murder. Besides, the case involved one of the sexiest men I had ever met, a pilot I could hardly keep my hands off. I had to know if he was the killer.

Before it was all over, yours truly had three murders to juggle and I looked likely to be the fourth. But, that's what happens when your beat is La-La Land. The only thing I couldn't figure was the drag queen angle...

"Replete with humor and plenty of risqué innuendos, the Honey West novels [were] an important precursor to some of today's best-known distaff dicks, including V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone." —The Rap Sheet

"In her time (the 1950s) Honey was a rarity—an independent woman calling her own shots. She was out there knocking on doors, taking down names, and answering to nobody but herself." —Mystery Scene

"Good pacing and character development for the first in a series. A noir Master." —Anna Marie M., Goodreads