Vincent Lardo – författare

South Florida''s premiere sleuth-about-town strikes again -- in a deliciously daffy caper that takes a decidedly deadly turn. When the Palm Beach Community Theater needs a director for its Production of Arsenic and Old Lace, Archy tosses his megaphone into the ring. After all, Hollywood legend Desdemona Darling will lend her considerable talents to the production. While resident grande dame Lady Cynthia Horowitz wants a little of the spotlight to fall on her latest live-in hunk, Buzz Carr, she has no intention of letting Buzz rehearse all day with the actress, who, like Lady C, has made marriage a cottage industry. For poor Archy, there''s more drama backstage than onstage, and plenty of confusion everywhere, especially with the fuzzy-headed Binky Watrous serving as stage manager. When an actor takes a sip of prop wine and drops dead, the Palm Beach police suddenly take a special interest in the local theater scene. In a play filled with murders, only Archy can separate the actors from the genuine article, and bring down the curtain on the latest and most enjoyable of McNally''s follies.

New York Times bestseller: A mystery “full of twists and turns” set among the elite society of Palm Beach (Library Journal).   The Palm Beach tennis season starts off with a bang when a pro is shot by his wife after she catches him with another woman. For Archy McNally, private investigator to the rich and infamous, the case seems open and shut. The killer, twice-married socialite Melva Williams, confesses to offing her cheating spouse in a moment of passion. Now she wants McNally to do her a favor: Keep the paparazzi away from her daughter, Veronica. Playing babysitter to the beautiful Veronica and remaining faithful to his fiancée prove beyond McNally’s capabilities. Before he can sort out his private life, blackmail enters the picture. As McNally attempts to find the truth amidst all the lies, his investigation must include a look into the past—and a tragedy that the world will never forget. 

When the husband of an actress sips a poisoned potable, Lawrence Sanders’s beloved Palm Beach PI must stage an investigation from his director’s chair.  One of the most celebrated stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Desdemona Darling, has come South for the season. She makes headlines when she agrees to star in the Palm Beach Community Theater’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Archy McNally somehow gets roped into directing—and into discreetly investigating who could be blackmailing his star. Life tragically imitates art when Richard Holmes—Darling’s Husband Number Seven—sips some elderberry wine laced with arsenic at the cast party. Holmes was a self-made millionaire with a genius for betting on pork bellies. But who’d want him dead? As McNally tries to smoke out the culprit, he wonders if he’s getting too close to a remorseless killer who’s about to drop the curtain on another victim.  

Lawrence Sanders’s beloved sleuth Archy McNally returns in a novel by Vincent LardoTruth is stranger than fiction in Archy McNally’s latest case, proving there’s no bond stronger than blood—except the bonds of a deadly secretBestselling author Sabrina Wright wants dapper detective Archy McNally to find her husband, who vanished while looking for her MIA daughter—it may seem like a simple case, but McNally knows it’s never that easy. Thirty-year-old Gillian Wright ran off to find her birth father, opening a Pandora’s box of scandalous revelations the tabloids can’t resist. It seems that Sabrina’s life was a bigger fiction than her bodice-ripping romances. Before her story is over, three powerful men with damning secrets could be outed . . . and murder will be the denouement. As McNally stumbles on one cover-up after another, he has one last chance to catch a killer who will stop at nothing to protect his name. 

Murder puts Lawrence Sanders’s Palm Beach PI in the prime suspect spotlight in the series “effortlessly written to be effortlessly enjoyed” (The Boston Globe). Hired to retrieve a client’s kiss-and-tell-all diary from her blackmailing ex-lover, Archy McNally doesn’t expect the mission to go awry. He makes the exchange easily enough, but as the Palm Beach private investigator returns to his sports car, he’s knocked out cold. When he wakes up, the diary is gone. Except it wasn’t a diary McNally was playing go-between to collect. It was the Holy Grail of lost literature—the original manuscript of Truman Capote’sAnswered Prayers. McNally will need some divine intervention of his own when he becomes the prime suspect in a homicide investigation headed by vampy, green-eyed blonde Georgia O’Hara. With everyone trying to seize the Capote opus, it’s up to McNally to write off a killer who’s waiting to close the book on him—permanently.  

If anyone can connect a dead waiter in a pool, a deceased duchess, and a possibly phony heir, it’s the Palm Beach PI—in this New York Times bestseller.  Malcolm MacNiff’s annual Tennis Everyone!fundraiser is the high point of the Palm Beach season. But the glittering A-list event hits rock bottom when a waiter is found floating face down in the pool.  Archy McNally instantly suspects foul play. No sooner are his fears confirmed than he has another mystery to solve. Society’s abuzz over the recent arrival of Lance Talbot from Switzerland to claim his half-billion inheritance from his grandmother’s estate, but some claim that Talbot’s a fraud. It falls to McNally to sift through the clues and uncover a murderous scam that stretches from the snowy Alps all the way to sunny Florida.  

The final book in the New York Times–bestselling series is “a wacky, waggish whodunit,” as the Palm Beach PI investigates a dead end in a maze (Publishers Weekly). The night Palm Beach society has been eagerly awaiting has finally arrived. Matthew Hayes, once the human cannonball in a traveling carnival and now a retired millionaire, is unveiling his Amazin’ Maze, styled after the historic hedge maze at England’s Hampton Court Palace. But even this wonder is upstaged by Hayes’s wife—when she’s found dead in the center of the labyrinth. Marvelous Marlena Marvel, a sideshow wonder of amazing pulchritude, was a devotee of the black arts. But the motive for her murder is as murky as her mystical talents . . . especially when Archy McNally uncovers a link to another homicide. It’s a crime scene straight out of Barnum & Bailey as McNally employs his own sleight-of-hand to catch a killer about to pull off the greatest vanishing act of all.