The night after merchandising king George Samson offers New York private eye Joe DiGregorio (False Faces, 1991) a million dollars to help him fake his death, he's murdered, shot in the face in the back of a cab, and Joe lands a job investigating his death. The suspects: his gaunt widow Mona; his cosseted, untalented niece Joanna Freeling; their obligatory male hangers-on, Samson's senile former rival Arthur Rudolph, and Stuart Arnot, head of the New York Alliance, which has recently paid out $5 million of Samson's grant money to a spurious agency headquartered in the Caymans. The messy mystery--felonies swarm like big city roaches, and nearly everybody's responsible for one or another of them--never lives up to its promising opening; but Joe and his mate, Alison Rosen, are as charming as ever, if not much smarter.
