Wade Miller – författare

When private investigator Max Thursday is asked to recover some gambling IOUs for a mysterious woman, he stumbles into a vicious blackmail ring. The Frame-up involves compromising photographs used as weapons against prominent men and women who are willing to pay high prices. The business is so lucrative that one of the local gangsters sets out to cut himself into the racket and ends up dead. Before he wraps up the case, Max has to outwit a pompous district attorney who wants to put him in jail and a seductive and dangerous lady boss of a crime syndicate who can’t decide if she wants him as a suitor or a corpse.

Her name was Shasta Lynn—a names as phony as the color of her golden hair. She was big and beautiful, and she knew how to tease when she stripped. She was so sensational no one noticed that an admirer in the last row wore a knife sticking in his heart.Curtains go up on a drama of murder, racketeering, dope-peddling, and double-dealing romance. And a smart San Diego cop calls the finale for one of the toughest killers ever to clear the stage for death.

Dave Lee was shot dead as he rode the Joyland ferris wheel. As hard-boiled private investigator Max Thursday stalked Dave’s killer, he encountered … a high-powered sob sister, the sadistic king of a gambling syndicate, and a delicate, sphinx-like girl who packed a .38 revolver. The best Wade Miller mystery yet! A tough private eye relentlessly pursues a wily, cold-blooded gunman through an amusement park.

A kidnapped boy!A terrified blonde!A fortune in stolen pearls!Hardboiled Max Thursday, on-time private eye, had given up being a detective. But when the kidnapped boy turned out to be his own son and the frightened blonde his beautiful ex-wife, Max went into action with blazing fury in his heart. In four of the most hectic and hazardous days of his career Max got himself shot at, beaten up, and accused of murder before he caught a kidnapper, solved a puzzle in pearls and dealt out justice to a guilty bystander!

When vice merchant Henry Blue rolls into town, there’s a warm reception waiting—hot bullets from some overzealous competitors. While the punctured gangster is indisposed, private investigator Max Thursday steps into his identity. Counting on the fact that Blue is a stranger to San Diego, Thursday takes a gambler’s chance on pulling off the deception. Blue’s daily, deadly rounds include contact with a gentle-voiced spiritualist, a gray-gloved thug, and a one-armed bandit. The odds are against Max when two women arrive on the scene—one or both are setting him up as a target for some trigger-happy hotheads. Max must slug his way out of trouble to smash the backbone of the sinister national crime syndicate that threatens to corrupt the town.

San Diego’s Chief of Homicide warns Max Thursday to keep out of the investigation of the murder of a beautiful redheaded divorcée. But Merle, the reporter girlfriend of the hard-fisted private investigator, begs Max to tackle the case, confessing a secret love affair with Bliss Weaver, the victim’s estranged ex-husband, whom the police are accusing of the killing. Then Weaver escapes from jail, and a second and a third strangling occur. Torn between a jealous desire to see his rival out of the way and his conviction that Weaver is innocent, Max begins a desperate chase after the murderer. From swank La Jolla to an isolated lighthouse, the trail finally leads to the ashes of a city dump, where Max must solve his own dilemma and the brutal crimes in a spine-tingling showdown.

When a phony count, a weird artist, and a dazzling blond beauty relentlessly dog his footsteps, hard-hitting private investigator Max Thursday knows his charming personality isn’t the attraction. And as soon as he opens the box he is guarding and finds a hundred grand in cold cash, Thursday has the first clue to a mystery that leads the rugged sleuth headlong into a bloody fight-to-the-finish with a ruthless gang of international smugglers.